Lifespace 803 (erotic memoir, edit 1)

Lifespace 803

Garth’s back is to me. “Hi,” I say. He doesn’t turn around. “Hi,” he says. “With you in a moment.”
I sit and sit. Go into the bedroom. Into the kitchen. To the bathroom to look in the mirror. My hair’s too short.
“Think I should let my hair grow?” I say, sliding in beside Garth.
“It was longer when I met you.”
“Yeah, it was.”
I stand there waiting for him to take my hand or wrap his arm around my hips the way he used to.
“Why did you move away?” he says.
“Because you didn’t seem to care either way.”
Everything is so low key. He thinks it’s cool. “Talon,” he says to his son. “Dad,” his son says. Deadpan. Two straight men.

Lifespace 803, Journal
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
The old tattered twisting that has consumed me like a tropical infestation has cleared out. I enter the Women’s gym, holding hands with inner peace. We’re buddies now, invisible friends, inner peace and I, though sometimes I worry inner peace will grow tired of me and vacate the premises. Maybe I’m holding on too tightly. So at this 7 a.m. time, before work which doesn't please me, this work that I do (even as I unfold and transforming), I take these deep breaths, willing myself home to my peaceful place.

The thing is you can’t will a peaceful place. First you’ve got to send out an invitation and then you wait. But when the doorbell does ring, it’s not the gym at all on the doorstep, but the top of Blueberry Hill in Lake Alverna when I was a child roosting at the top of a hill with blueberries all around and the wind in my hair. I see the bare rock now and I am standing on its peak, near and in the sky, and I love it so much, up here. Are there any objections, any part of the body not at peace? I say, sliding up into a tightness in my throat. So then I ask—what is this all about? and I think because I have to go to work, because I want to stay home and write and paint, and proceed with what are you wanting from that staying home and painting, to which I answer the chance to be me, to read, finally relax. Ah, I say, getting into the groove and congratulating myself, what are you wanting through rest and being at home? Just being me, just being, I say. Aha, being, I think, tears surging like a swelling throng. Just to be. “Your time will come, Janice, your time will come,” I say, warming to myself and this notion, because in me now like a lover is this being, this simplicity, and in my deepest knowing that resides as always in my cunt, another one of Garth’s epiphanies builds: how I am my own honey and mother and consort, and I cradle this knowing tender as newborn babe, anchoring it by bringing one hand to my heart as I practiced in Lifespace, then opting for two. And I grin because Barbara has worked on this with me, inner peace on one hand and vitality on the other, joining and bringing in both, folding both hands to my heart and because here I am typing away in this pre-work time, discovering yet another floor to come on.


Lifespace Journal, March 29th, 2001.
Lisa, who is in Israel in this frightening time with dismantled bombs and bombs not dismantled, phones me. Should she stay with Nadavi, her boyfriend, who claims that she, my Lisa, is wonderful but not the one or should she reclaim Israel as her own and go to a kibbutz? Living in Israel and working six days a week is like being in Toronto, she says, except the weather is thirty degrees and minus three in Toronto. What should she do, she is so confused, she says. “Just a minute, I’m going to find my peaceful place and listen.” I say, grabbing a chair, but I don’t know which technique to use. So I flash through them all: felt sense, asking inside for a word or phrase, flipping for a visual image and letting it come, inquiring what is this all about and what are you wanting, talking to myself in slow-moving low tones about relaxing and the whole unfolding thing, while all I really have to do is stay empathetic, repeating a phrase or two along the way or sampling the insightful empathy I learned in class on Saturday.

Maybe she should stop work and just enjoy the country for its own sake, she says after I empathize like crazy for fifteen minutes, and finish off her traveling sprint with an air of euphoria. Wow, I say, what a great idea and does she want to take it to Paris. “What are you saying I should take to Paris?” she says. “Euphoria, like you said,” I say, which I know doesn’t make sense, euphoria being a product of and not a precursor to, but the bombs like fireworks on the beach have brought me back to the sound of sirens when we hid under our desks in the Cold War, and Lisa isn’t listening to get out while you can and you’re still alive since she’s adopted an Israeli's state of mind, seizing hold of life and love.

“My daughter’s in Israel,” I told the Asian lady in the subway store next to the condo when I purchased the twenty-dollar gold calling card.
“Oh,” she smiled, “daughter!”
“Yes,” I said. “I want her come home.”
“Daughter coming home!” she said, nodding her head.
“No,” I said, shaking mine.

Lisa’s heart is broken is broken because she’s twenty-three and loves Nadavi. I’m glad though. Because if her heart is broken perhaps she’ll leave and go to Shakespeare’s book store in Paris. She’s a poet and I adore her. I painted a picture, a thirty-six by twenty-eight inch canvas, of her with clouds clinging to her eyelashes beneath her eyes, a moon above her left shoulder, and a slim white necklace with an infinity symbol on her neck. On the bottom right I etched the words to Ewan McColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
“I painted a picture of you. It’s good. I painted every stroke with such love, really. Every stroke. It’s you, hon, you inspire me.” I couldn’t help myself, I cried. “Come home,” I said. I wish she would come home. I don’t give a fuck about peaceful places, I just want my kid home. That’s all.

 
Lifespace Journal

Barbara says god is loving yourself, that we all have god inside and a universe too. So when I’m frozen on that solid yellow line with traffic zooming by north and south and pain sears me from the inside out, god is in me like a safe, holding me close. Except she doesn’t say that thing about god being a condom. She’s got this redheaded man, a Jew named David, with whom she shares a spiritual and physical compatibility. “How can he fuck her? She’s so ugly.” I once asked Garth. “Aren’t you the one who told me a hole is just a hole?” he said and I just looked at him. It’s rare that he quotes me.

I spend my day reframing and transforming, taking deep breathes, summoning up peaceful places, and resourceful memories, bargaining with myself: think of a time when you felt at peace, just being, a total body sigh, the deepness and breadth of such a sigh. It doesn’t always work. On work days, which are every day, when my alarm zaps me, I submerge under Garth’s Zeller’s black quilt. As soon as I get up I boil water for my No Name Columbian instant coffee, measuring out one tablespoon of vanilla ice cream for my daily fix of decadence. Before Lifespace, I used to walk into the mall with my hands by my side, my middle fingers unsheathed like a knife in an angry up-yours, fuck you fuck you fuck you.

Last week, a client canceled her session, so I decided to sneak in a little cardio, snagged a headset, plugged it into the entertainment theater system, and reclined on the slanted leather pad, my legs pumping me into a holiday, somewhere far off, muggy hot on a crystal beach with waves carrying me out to sea, congratulating myself on yet another anchor, placing my right hand diagonally across the left side of my chest and pressing in for emphasis. I have learned to anchor in the rising or the peak. I do the same with my left hand on my bathroom floor; I figure we’re like rats, so if I’m feeling out of sorts, well, I can just put my hand to my chest and slide into an invisible come. Right when I’m training the orthodox women and their jeweled suburban counterparts.

Thursday is Tubishsva’at.
Naomi can’t train because it is a fasting day. This is a day of recorded horrors which Naomi lists off for me as she struggles through her sprints on the step mill. I want to rev up her metabolic rate. “Stay inside, devils roam outside,” she says. “Better to remain safe indoors.” There is no safe zone for me. “Naomi,” I say, “maybe I am here to teach you how to reshape your body while you bring my soul into the light.” “She’s my spiritual coach,” I say to the wigged female on the adjacent Stairmaster and smile at Naomi. Creating a bond keeps them coming back. When I train someone, we link even though I come home and tell Garth how I despise them. “You mean you want to kill them all,” he says. “No,” I say, “I just want their money.” I say I hate them and then I give out my home phone number which goes against the first trainer’s rule: never become friends with your clients. “But what if she needs me?” I say to the other trainers. “Let her make an appointment and pay for it,” they say. “You’re right,” I say as I scribble my number for Naomi who has a present for me, a turquoise stone inside the palm of a silver hand. To ward of evil spirits, she says.

Kathy quit. So did Shari Weil and Susan Koffman. Leah as well. Kathy quit because she’s a lazy sulk who hates training and her body. These young girls—out of shape, fast talkers with deadpan intonations, despising their flabby white flesh. Fuck this Kathy. And Shari with her “I don’t like that exercise, hate that one, give me another— fifteen pound curls, are you crazy? I told you I don’t want to bulk up. Say what can I do about this? And don’t tell me it’s food,” grabbing at her underarm flesh. Bad vibes for sure. The ones with bad vibes ultimately leave. A curse on them. May they rot in the ground like a tsibala, their heads planted in the ground and hordes of Russian soldiers depositing and moving on, a whole stumbling fumbling-with-zippers pack of them. Shari lost twenty-two pounds with me, had fifteen more to go, spoiled orthodox ambivalent shit with her Jacob crop pants one day and ankle-length skirt the next. She once wore a silk silver designer number with a double gauze layer insert from her knees to her ankles. To hell with Kathy and Shari and Susan who joined weight watchers and still looks the same, and Leah with her scheduled screwing and untouchable times. Sheri even goes to Mikvah, this freckled red-haired chick strips, dunks in the cold mikvah waters, and receives blessings. Like a physical confession. Babbling bathing women—let these ancient phlegmatic fools with veins like road maps, sagging bellies and earth-bound tits gorge on their bagels with cream cheese and lox and Friday night Challah. I hate them all.


Lifespace Relationship session
April 11,2001

“Well, I can tell you what love is not,” Garth says, crossing his arms and leaning back on the indigo Indian print covering Barbara’s beige corduroy sofa. “Not jealous, not malicious, not stifling, vindictive, judgmental, demeaning, not self-absorbed. And what it is. Impartial, unconditional, forgiving, sacrificing. Sometimes love can be heartbreaking, but in the end, love is definitely not the most powerful force. Love is a force, just like hate, just like evil. And the base, the source is energy, something that can be taken and perverted, warped, used for evil same as good. I don’t feel that motivations are what matter. It’s actions, because when you’re dead, if you believe in a final judgment, what’s going to happen is—”
He just wants be to be heard, a gift I offer him. “You’re not supposed to give a gift and then broadcast it,” Garth says whenever I list what I’ve done for him. “But you said I don’t do anything for you, you pushed me against the wall,” I say, my voice faltering and cracking at “anything.” And here I am taking him to Barbara’s for one hundred and fifty dollars worth of relentless reps so he can list why I don’t please him. At each end of this sofa, we sit with a gelatinous stillness between us.

“Let’s get on with it,” he says, refusing Barbara’s relaxation and resourcefulness warm-ups. Garth prides himself on his spiritual abilities. Holding a speckled gray rock in the palm of his hand, he says he feels demeaned, I don’t approve of anything he likes, his comic books, TV shows, his movies. “She has illustrated a premeditated effort to push me down, a consistent purposeful effort to drive me into the ground.” He says I use the word “lesser.” On an ongoing basis.
“I don’t recall using the word—it’s just not in my vocabulary,” I say.
“Don’t even say it. Don’t even say it. You know that my memory is a thousand times better than yours. I feel very strongly about the premeditation of her actions,” he says, his good eye boring straight ahead. He has not shaved for two days. The razor forces his facial hairs to grow inward, and I think that’s what I do to him, asking him to smooth his surfaces while he seethes beneath.
“It’s not my purpose to push you into the ground. And I have shown you,” I say, my words struggling to stay afloat and gasping for air. You talk about actions—every day I show you how I value your potential and your future. All I wanted was to go to an art gallery with you.”
“Going to an art gallery, seeing what you call modern art? That is art? A child can do that! But no, you criticize the viewer.”
“If I punch you in the head will it hurt you?” he says.
“What?”
“Excuses have no meaning to me. Cause and effect. Stop analyzing. It’s simple—I don’t like that. Modern English. Not Canterbury Tales. Direct.”
It’s true I love words. I love the way they choose each other as dance partners, jitterbug, mambo, slow dance, how they make out in the parking lot afterward, maybe get lucky.

“I know I can really talk,” I say. “What he doesn’t know is how I edit myself, my words, and tone, how I start thinking in one language and then dissolve into another, his, summarizing and translating until I’ve almost forgotten my native tongue. But I miss them, the words, I long for them because I remember where I come from, the history, you know, the landscape, and I’m in the new country like my grandparents. My grandmother spoke Yiddish to the end. And here I am assimilating. I’m a Jew, damn it.”
“You see what I mean?” he says. “It’s always me. What I do. What I’ve done. It’s one thing to appreciate words, but I thought words served a purpose. You know, communication?”

He lists what he doesn’t do with me anymore. Movies, television, dialogue. So I ask him where this leaves a couple and he says, “You should have thought of that before.” Barbara suggests we go to a movie as a practice. “Why do it?” he says as he swerves into cause and effect, he doesn’t believe I see the need to change. It’s not that he didn’t forewarn me, he says.
“But you say you’re forgiving? What was it you said about love being forgiving?”
“Love is forgiving, alright, but it isn’t stupid,” he says. “Actions speak louder than words for me. It’s too late. It’s just too late.”

(Remembering words and barbs casually but precisely thrown, is like struggling with intricate choreography.)

“I have to move out,” he says.
“Now?”
“I have to separate myself from you.”
“A time frame. Can you give me a time frame?”
“Two, three months before. Four months rebuilding.”
“So you’re saying we work for two or three and you move out for four months. And then you move back in. But see, what I can’t understand is, why, why can’t we clear it up before you leave. What I don’t understand is why you have to leave.”
“It’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.”

Two weeks later.

Outside our apartment in the eighth floor corridor, Garth asks if I have any cash. I scrounge in the pockets of my dark brown leather Mark’s Work Wear House jacket and hand him a five-dollar bill. The bill falls on the new Indian-style carpet the condo association has just installed as part of its renovation project. “Thank you for dropping the money on the ground for me to pick up,” he says. “I didn’t do it purposefully,” I say. “Really, I didn’t. I can see how you might feel angry. I’m just tired.”

The way he sees it, as he tells me, it’s all part of the same premeditated effort to drag him down; he drives me to work, keeping the car so that he might drive his son to school, maybe do a few errands or go to the gym. “Do you have a five on you?” he says. I drop a fiver at his feet. Base respect, gone.
I say, “I’m going to work, this money is keeping us afloat, a roof over our head, buying us food. I can’t work this way. They’ll see my eyes.”
“Who told you to cry?”
“I once saw a movie. He drives her and drives her until she’s beside herself. You like money. I can’t earn it like this. Won’t you just stop?”
“Trust you to bring it back to money!”
"But that’s what you’ve been saying all these years. You hate people. Come on, you just want to grab their cash. A million isn’t enough for you, you need hundreds of millions. A billion would really please you.”
“And it wouldn’t please you?”
“I’m not saying it wouldn’t please me. I have Caroline and Lisa. But I’m starting to think, you know, that money isn’t everything. And I still believe in love. I left Stephen because he was crazy intoxicated with money. And you, well, you saved me in your way. Because I would never have left otherwise.”
“Do you know what the happiest time in my life was?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“I don't know, what?”
“Nina Street. See, I’m not all about money. But if you tell anyone I’ll have to kill you,” he says which makes me smile. His face is smooth. He must shaven for me. I put my hand that has always looked ancient on his massive thigh and lean over to kiss his still-soft lips. “You shaved,” I say before I open the car door.

He feels entitled. He says this. And that it’s a flaw, this feeling. I know one thing about this man. He’s out for revenge. Once he told me, after he’d fucked me, when he was resting his head on my belly, something—it is the morning of his eighth birthday and he’s soaping up in the shower as he does even now with attention to detail such soles of feet, between toes, behind calves, around ankles, and inside ears, when the curtain is slashed aside, a few shower hooks becoming undone, and there is his mother, the chain whip in her hand. Afterward, soap and blood washing down the drain.

I like asking him about his childhood because he’s so huge. In high school he was pack head of an irreverent strutting bunch. And one day he just journeyed into the night and the darkness stuck to him. He says I gave him hope when we met and for a while after, he loves me still though he’s stopped hoping, and I put my head on his shoulder because I’ve let him down and he’s a lost child.
And I, with evictions, belligerent husband, one daughter ill, and worrying always for the other who is well, what does he want from me? He cares for his son. Has no job, has not finished my ISSA promised over a year ago, I think in truth he loves, wants money isn’t willing, to work using me doesn’t wish to spend time. Leaves messages, not I miss you how are you how is your day, but when is your break so I can go to the gym, when, and can I have the car.

Garth is a man in a lineup. I can’t recognize him. Yet still needing to know if I love him after these five years and why this hurt when he is not suited and that’s the truth. This rocking pain is like the flat lands of the prairies and I haven’t the strength to leave, there’s such a gust of poverty, even though he doesn’t hold me, no comfort little love making, no tender kissing, always hammering and hammering.
Transform, transform, transform. Deep breaths and eyes closed. Searching for a peaceful place, to settle down, ease this body into, sooth the mind clear the space. The ocean perhaps. Waves like pages flipping. Watching the old in and out, colors like my Golden paints—viridian, magenta, cerulean and manganese blue. Wading into and unfolding it just a bit— the greenness and I, the sand, there are no others oh yes, a few, walking by, holding hands two old ones. I wish for a hand to hold.
I won’t. Squeezing out a peaceful place and resource base as I sit in front of a machine, this computer. Won’t anchor either, won’t blend and integrate. I’ll ask. That’s what I’ll do.
“What’s this all about, Janice?”
“Oh honey,” I say, “it’s about disappointment.”
It’s about waiting and searching and crying inside. I know how to do this. Because I’ve stashed in my back hip pocket this Lifespace central coordinator technique from Barbara.

The Central Coordinator
Central Coordinator: Disappointment and looking all over. And what’s this all about? Look inside.
Me: Love.
Central Coordinator: It’s about love.
Me: Needing his arms around me, they were such large arms.
Central Coordinator: These great arms to hold you.
Me: Yes. Surround me and carry me, you know, the way children are thrown up and down and how they laugh.
Central Coordinator: Arms holding and freeing. And what is more important than holding and freeing?
Me: Just loving. I need to love someone. And the same back. That’s all. The old love and be loved thing.
Central Coordinator: Loving and being loved. Pure and simple. And what is this all about love and being loved? Take a moment and ask inside.
Me: Freedom and joy and warmth. No more despair.
Central Coordinator: The end of despair. That tiredness and despair. Warmth instead and love. And if you had love and all that glowing warmth, how would you feel then?
Me: Oh, happy. Life might be hard but I’d have help.
But he can’t do this, this surround-sound holding, so I hold my own self. What’s that song? “I’ve got my love to keep me warm.” See, I always thought it was someone else’s love.