The Unspeakable (6 page)

He took me to the spirit guide counselor one time. He said he wanted me to understand him better, and because my anthropological curiosity often trumps my common sense (and because he was covering all costs, including the scenic Amtrak ride down the coast from L.A.), I agreed. The counselor, who, if I recall, charged $200 for a forty-minute session, asked me a few things about myself: what were my greatest fears, what was my most cherished memory, what were my most pressing issues at the moment. Though my most pressing issue was that I was dating someone with whom I had spectacularly little in common and somehow hadn't yet gotten around to breaking up with, I told her that I had “commitment issues” generally. She handed me the glasses and had me lie down on the massage table. She told me to tell her what colors I became aware of as she chanted and beat the drums. The visual effect was a lot like what happens when you press down on your eyelids. I told her I saw a lot of black and some yellow. She took out a steel triangle and struck it with a mallet. She took out a cowbell and rang it several times. After about half an hour she told me to go into the living room and wait while she received the message from my spirit guide. My gentleman friend was sitting on the sofa flipping through the most recent issue of
Variety
, which he'd brought with him. He explained that the counselor always provided a full-page, single-spaced report that she typed up on her computer in a postsession fury of divine dictation.

Soon enough she came in with the results. She said I was the reincarnation of the spirit master Lord Lanto, an ascended master who serves as the ruler of the Second Ray of the solar presence. This is the ray of wisdom, and it vibrates as the color yellow. On the train ride home, I read my report:

Blessings and praise to you, Divine Meghan. You are indeed a star child. But you are so much more than that. You are an ascended master who has chosen to incarnate this lifetime to assist the planet in its time of transition … Life on earth has been a little bit difficult for you to adjust to. You come from a much more advanced civilization and it is hard for you to understand how humans can do the things they do to one another in the name of God and in the name of love. This is why you shy away from committed and close relationships … It will be good for you to see the spirit guide counselor again as soon as possible because she is the accelerator and the awakener. You need to have a private session so your needs can be more easily met.

That's just an excerpt, but you get the gist.

My paramour seemed pleased by this, as Lanto was known to emanate an intense golden aura from his heart center, which was visible to those who had “learned through deep practice how to see,” and which he had noticed on me recently while we were watching television. For his part, his work with the spirit guide counselor had long ago established that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

This man was one of those people who don't just think or believe in things but are
about
things.
Let me tell you what I'm about
, he said on one of our earlier dates. He was about “spontaneity” and “acceptance.” He was about “being in the moment.” One time, in the midst of a discussion over how I should design my new business cards, he suggested I incorporate a pattern of circles, such as he had done on his own self-designed cards. When I said, “I don't like circles, I like squares,” his body caved in a bit, and he looked hurt. “If you don't like circles,” he said, “you don't like me.”

Like most of us, this man was full of contradictions, though whereas in some people contradictions can add to overall interestingness, the effect in his case was mostly exasperating. For all his disciplined mellowness, he erred more than a little on the side of obsessive compulsion. Though it's hard now to believe our relationship advanced to the air-travel stage, we ended up taking a trip to New York, where we stayed at the Hilton Towers in midtown Manhattan. Upon our arrival, he decided he didn't like our room and requested a move to a higher floor. He made this decision after we'd been in the room a solid fifteen minutes, enough time for him to unpack his suitcase and not only hang his shirts and pants in the closet but also fold his socks and underwear and sweaters into neat stacks in the dresser drawers. When I suggested to him that all of the rooms in this thirty-six-story hotel were pretty much identical he told me that we were paying guests and deserved our money's worth (which happened to be $140 per night via
Priceline.com
). He called the front desk and requested a room change and soon a bellman arrived to escort us to a higher floor.

Upon inspection of the new room, my friend decided he didn't like the desk chair in the new room as much as the one in the old room and asked if they could be swapped out.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked.

“I just want to have the best possible experience,” he said.

“Well, you are not asking this gentleman to go switch the chairs,” I said, glancing sheepishly at the bellman.

“Then I'll do it myself,” he said. He then rolled the chair out into the hallway and accompanied the bellman down the elevator to the first room. Ten minutes later, he returned with the previous desk chair, which had armrests whereas the other did not.

I'm a little hazy on the details of the rest of this trip. However, I do remember sitting in silence at the airport while Desk Chair, a perfectly able-bodied forty-year-old, insisted on preboarding our return flight along with “those in need of special assistance” because he wanted to secure more overhead space and was not above lying about having a back injury. (I refused to partake in this scheme and we boarded separately.) And though I have tried many times to forget, I'm afraid I also recall quite vividly that, upon our arrival in L.A., I somehow ending up riding in the backseat of my own car as we left the airport.

When I try to piece together exactly how this happened, my best guess is that I'd started off in the passenger seat (apparently we'd achieved the level of intimacy signified by one person feeling comfortable driving the other's car) but reached behind me to find a dropped item and, not locating it, actually crawled into the backseat. By the time I found whatever it was (my cell phone, if I had to bet on it), we had exited the airport and were merging onto the freeway. And though I should have simply climbed back into the passenger seat without announcement I instead asked for permission (in a “will it distract you if I step over the console now?” kind of way), and Desk Chair told me it wasn't safe to move around in a speeding car. When I asked if he meant that I should remain in the backseat for the rest of the forty-minute drive he said something to the effect of “I guess so.” And so I rode in my own backseat going east on the 105 freeway and north on the 110 past the L.A. Convention Center and the luminous, blocky skyscrapers of downtown. I rode in my own backseat as we headed northwest toward Hollywood on the 101 freeway and then exited onto the dark, scabrous streets of the then still-a-little-funky, still-gentrifying neighborhood where we both lived because we were single and “creative” and this was where single, creative people lived if they wanted to surround themselves with—and potentially date and possibly marry—like-minded folk.

Desk Chair and I parted ways shortly after that. He found a woman who liked circles, married her, and had a child. I took a year off from dating after that, during which time I cut my hair even shorter than it had been previously and proceeded to look a great deal like a lesbian even though I had little interest in actually being one. When I grew tired of that racket I slowly began growing my hair out, holding back my shaggy bangs with little bobby pins
1
and, almost overnight, attracting men again. In relatively quick succession, I dated a lawyer, a film producer, a medical resident, and a couple writers. Then I met my husband. In less than a week, I knew he was the person I was supposed to marry. I knew this because of a certain (somewhat tasteless, though delicious to me) joke he cracked during our very first conversation and the way his apartment was taken up mostly by surfboards and old copies of
The New York Review of Books
. I also knew that I wouldn't have wanted to meet him even a day earlier than I did. I wouldn't have been ready. I was at that time thirty-six years old.

You might be thinking that I had a severe case of arrested development. Thirty-six (my husband was a tender thirty-five) is a fairly geriatric age at which to decide you're mature enough to settle down (and in fact we didn't feel mature enough to actually get engaged until more than three years later, at which point we had a bittersweet incentive to not drag our feet, because my mother was dying). You might also be thinking, based on my rather astonishing lack of agency in the relationship with Desk Chair, that I was relatively inexperienced with men at the time.

But here was the thing about my dating life. I spent most of it with absolutely no eye toward making a permanent commitment. What I was in it for, what I was
about
, was the fieldwork aspect. I wasn't looking to be delivered from the lonely haze of bachelorettehood into the smug embrace of coupledom. I was looking for experiences, for characters,
for people who paid other people to chant and beat drums while they lay on massage tables wearing flashing LED sunglasses
. I regarded my love interests less as potential life mates than as characters in a movie I happened to have wandered into. I suppose that I had some version of a physical type (Roman nose, Eastern European descent, a predilection toward plaid flannel shirts) but for every man who checked these boxes there were others who veered off the page entirely. I dated an airline pilot (conservative Catholic, ex-military, resident of Florida) who said “mind-bothering” when he actually meant “mind-boggling.” I lived for nearly three years with a wannabe mountain man who subsisted on what he earned from odd jobs and did not have a bank account. I also, despite the seemingly large number of men I've referred to, spent a whole lot of time not dating anyone at all—more time, I daresay, than most of the other single people I knew. (A cast of characters this plentiful is less a function of being promiscuous than of not meeting your future spouse until you are thirty-six.)

These experiences brought about many headaches and arguments and lectures from friends—“But he's so limited!” “You can't bring him anywhere!” “He believes the earth is three thousand years old!” My friends were often right. Some of these relationships were slightly ridiculous, but I am certain that they made me a more interesting person than I would have been if I'd limited my dating pool to more conventionally suitable men. As for the conventionally suitable men I did spend time with, I've peered at enough of their lives through the rosy portal of Facebook to get a sense of what could have been had I not dispatched them (or, just as often, they dispatched me) over some real or imagined evidence of incompatibility. And though I've admired their beaming children and their comely, accomplished wives and the stainless-steel appliances and apron-front sinks that make quiet, satisfied appearances in the backgrounds of photos snapped spontaneously at the family breakfast table, I've never come away feeling anything other than happiness for their apparent happiness.

The way I'm wired, I was never going to settle down before I did. If I had met my soul mate at twenty-four or even twenty-nine or thirty-three, I would have left him before things got too serious. I had boxes to check that I believed were bigger than any relationship. I wanted to get far enough in New York City to live without roommates. I wanted to leave New York City and move someplace very unlikely. I wanted to wring as many experiences as I could out of the unlikely place and then move to Los Angeles, where I would buy a house by myself and live in it with my dog and no one else. Upon reaching this point, I reasoned, I would be exponentially more fascinating than I'd been at any of the earlier junctures and therefore able to attract a similarly fascinating person. To have stopped at any point along the way would have been to quit the race too soon. It would have caused me to be an inferior person living an inferior life. This is what I tell myself, anyway. This is what I tell my husband when he says he wishes we had met earlier. This is an integral part of my personal mythology and I'm sticking to it.

*   *   *

A few years ago I was asked to take part in a panel discussion on the subject of marriage. The central questions had to do with what might be considered the best time to get married and whether nuptial-delaying heathens like myself represent a trend that may be good for us as individuals but ultimately Bad For America. The panel was being organized by the director of an outfit called the National Marriage Project, a research initiative designed to study marriage and its relationship to society and public policy (and then advocate for it strongly). The Project was trying to promote a new report called “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” and, as the director put it, to “start a dialogue.” The participants in this dialogue would be two of the report's authors, one of whom directed the National Marriage Project itself, and two woman writers from L.A., one of whom was me. Each speaker would present ten to fifteen minutes of remarks before the panel discussion began. As the report's authors were both family men with religious leanings and other red state sensibilities (not that they announced themselves as such), my job was to comment on their findings and represent the “female point of view” or the “urban point of view” or, at the very least, “another perspective.” For this I would be paid a generous and un-turn-down-able sum of $2,500.

The perspective on which I was supposed to provide some kind of alternative was the theory posited by the Marriage Project that “delayed marriage” (they cited the statistic that the average age of first marriage is twenty-seven for women and after twenty-nine for men) was beneficial to the educated middle and upper middle classes, especially women in these classes, but had deleterious effects on the non-college-educated population. The reason was that less-educated people (defined as those with only high school and some college and referred to in the report as “Middle Americans”) were skipping the marriage step but going ahead and having children anyway. The report identified two models of marriage. There was the “capstone” model, which sees marriage as a kind of reward for accomplishing any number of personal and professional goals, or, as they put it, “having your ducks in a row.” And then there was the “cornerstone” model, which sees marriage as the foundation and starting point from which you build a life.