The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  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 of just 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 Japan 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 Japan, 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 assuring 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 space to create a world worth catching up with. Some colleges have now instituted 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 Japan—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 reassurance 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 space 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 reconstituted 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 Japan: 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 Japan 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 pornographic, nothing else. Using euphemisms about your penis counted as a true gentleman’s move. I was no better than the rest. Twenty-one and horny 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 amusement parks and dining out and walks on the beach. Ridiculous shit. 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 masturbate 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 sex 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 sex, but my crew consisted of some sterling me
n. 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 classes just because I couldn’t pull my big butt 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 fucking 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.

  “Hello, Michael.”

  “Hello, 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 ass, I don’t know. But I sure as hell 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 sex with other women, Margie and I would also have real conversations after the sex was done. She’d want to know what I’d been reading in class 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 space 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 embarrassment if one of them overheard us.

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

  While she and I were “together” I’d thought of myself like an astronaut going on one of those spacewalks outside the space shuttle. Below me I could see Earth, the glorious terrain. The place where true couples dwelled. And while I wasn’t there, I could still view it. I knew what it looked like. And in time I’d make my way back into the shuttle; I’d hit the thrusters on my spaceship and return to that good soil.

  But when Margie and I stopped talking it was as if the craft had blown to bits. I had plenty of oxygen in my suit, but I was no longer tethered to anything.

  And the shock waves of the blast didn’t send me hurtling down to Earth.

  Instead, they blew me backward.

  Deeper into space.

  It’s funny to have to relate all this first. Because I really want to tell you about my life after I lost weight. What sex was like once I’d exercised and dieted myself down to 195 pounds. That’s from the lifetime high of somewhere just north of 350. How did I manage the miracle? I bought a refurbished StairMaster and used it four days a week. And I joined Jenny Craig, the weight-loss system that used out-of-work ce
lebrities in their ads. Ridiculous as it sounds, it worked.

  To belabor the astronaut metaphor just a minute longer: I’d found my way back to Earth after having drifted through the lifeless void for two years. Victory parades were thrown in my honor. The president offered me heartfelt congratulations. (By which I mean my mother was incredibly proud of my change.) Here’s our man, finally height and weight proportionate! Once again a member of the human race.

  But in the time I’d been away—when I’d been inhuman, I guess—I’d journeyed well past phone sex of any kind. Leapfrogged over message boards and heated Internet exchanges. I’d found another phone line where each side really did want to meet and make things happen.

  I had sex—lots of it—with women who were, essentially, just like me. By which I mean more than 350 pounds and crippled by self-loathing. We made our introductions on the phone line, essentially negotiating the details of our affections in advance. I want this and you want that; I won’t do any of those things, but I will try these. As a result I’d show up at some woman’s apartment for the first time and we’d be naked in about ten minutes. Engaging in the kind of sexual fantasies that usually require six months of dating before anyone will even broach the subject. And then they probably still wait another six months before they trust each other enough actually to try it. We covered all that ground in a single night.

  And I’ll tell you what I learned during those two years: fat people are perverts.

  By which I mean to say, loneliness perverts you.

  I’m not talking about the sex. Or not exclusively, anyway. My first date as a trimmer man scared me more than my very first fistfight. Part of the reason was that I didn’t even realize we were on a date.