Epiphany:
I didn’t know you were waiting for me in the Yule Room of the Amagansett Presbyterian church, with it’s twin spire still missing from the great hurricane of 1937, it’s moldy red carpet, and wood-paneled walls lined with photographs of past pastors. But that is where our Debtors Anonymous meeting was on Monday nights. It took me years to join DA. I cried when I had to tally up numbers. I was petrified to look at my bank account balance until it was overdrawn. But by 2012 I was scared enough to embark on yet another twelve step program, in another musty church, with another version of the steps.
I was enraged to be there, which I voiced loudly. I didn’t want to have to change any more, but I was desperate for everything around me to be different. You must have enjoyed my ferocity very much. At the end of every meeting we went around the table and voiced our prayers for the coming week. I remember you pausing and letting the sparkles gleam in your eyes before you said: “Surprise me.” It astonished me. What wild abandon. I don’t think I told you that you are still the bravest person I’ve ever known.
Small miracles started happening. Out of the blue that Christmas you were offered back your old position as a psychotherapist. After years of seeing only a few private patients at home, suddenly you had an office. You could wear your tailored suit jackets, and shirts on which you changed the buttons to mother of pearl; your polished lace-up shoes, and your sumptuous collection of silk socks, suspenders, vests, and hats. Seeing you at meetings fully dressed stopped my heart.
At the same moment a small school in Hudson, NY, was offering a workshop in oral history and radio. I summoned the courage to walk into the Amagansett Library and ask the director if she would pay to send me, so that I could teach a course. Not only did she agree, but asked me if I would like to create a podcast for the library.
So magic was already afoot one Sunday at an AA meeting when I ambushed you at the cookie table in the back. I wanted you to be my interview subject for my radio course, but I knew that you would definitely dislike the idea. The last place in the world you would want to be was on the radio. I eased into it gently:
“I’m going to ask you a question…”
“Yes, Miss Westerman?”
“…and I want you to say ‘Yes’. ‘Yes’ to whatever it is.”
“Ah, then I guess it’s ‘Yes’ then.”
If you had replied with your habitual ‘No’ our lives would have been completely different. A few nights later in my room on Copeces Lane we sat on my broken yard sale couch, which conveniently dipped in the middle, forcing us rather close, and I turned on the microphone and began our first interview.
You told me your mother had dressed you in crinoline skirts that puffed out sideways when you were a girl, and that you still loved dressing up. At the age of forty when your mother passed you decided to be the person you had known you were as a child; that you secretly hoped you might be able to sing like Dean Martin after your gender change, and that the journey from female to male took twenty years to fully season.
When I listened back to our interview I heard it in the cadence of our voices, in the comfort and laughter. It was obvious that love was electrifying us. I turned it off. It was terrifying. I realized that we had actually fallen in love, and it had to be stopped. I knew what was happening, so I could put a halt to our interviews. Obviously you had no idea, otherwise you would have moved quietly away from me on that sloping couch. You would never have volunteered to be my DA ‘Goals Partner’ and come to my room every week.
Oh no, I thought, not another transformation. You and I had been through so many life changing forks in the road, and now was it possible that we were going to do it again together? No. I couldn’t allow it. I was a messy fifty-two-year-old, overeducated, underemployed, and definitely damaged. I was moving from rented room to rented room every nine months. I drove a hand-me-down car with no muffler, and pieces of rust falling off. I played the part with some style and panache, but I was not interested in leaping over another romantic cliff after my last one. So, I decided to keep this love thing under my hat, and wait until it blew over.
For some reason I didn’t turn on the light in my bedroom on the night of January sixth. I suppose I didn’t want to see, or for anything to come to light, or time to move an inch forward. I didn’t know the moon was full, or that January sixth was Little Christmas. I didn’t know there was such a thing, or that it was known as The Epiphany, until you told me after the fact. I left you a bland voice message. The interview was done. I had all I needed. I thanked you. When you called back I didn’t pick up. When you called again you insisted I tell you what had changed between us, and why you weren't going to be invited back to my room.
“Don’t you know what’s happening?” I cried, finally bursting out with my own little epiphany. It was obvious. It was awful. It was right there on the tape! It was embarrassing. Surely everyone else must know, including your wife.
I can hear your voice so clearly still. “Oh, dear girl, why are you crying?” you asked.
“I’m crying because I can’t believe how much it is going to hurt you to have to let me go!”
That is still one of the most uncanny things I have said. How did I know that you would really have to let me go five years later? That I would be kneeling at your side in the dark hospital room at Mount Sinai, that I would lock eyes with you and tell you it was OK that you had to go? I told you I would take care of things here on the ground while you traveled on.
After we hung up that night I wept even harder at losing my best friend. So loudly that it roused my perpetually stoned, yoga teacher roommate out of her room. She hugged me in that funky, echoing bathroom, where I had spent so many nights in the tub reading and rereading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. Not yet realizing that things were also falling together, precisely and divinely. That night I could only see the broken eggs. I was lost, but when I checked my email, there were three sentences waiting:
“ I am stupid. And everything you said is true,” you wrote.
I don’t know how long it took me to calm down before I could reply:
“Maybe I will be able to stand it in a little bit. I just haven't felt anything this powerful in a long time. Its scary.”
The next day you wrote to me with the heading:
“ALIVE!
I would say so many things to you, but any step being forward now, this matter can only be referred, and referred, and referred to God, asking good for all concerned. It's all true; you are not alone in this. You are right to distance yourself.”
I replied:
“Surprise me is a powerful prayer. I can't yet find a place to fit something this big. My body is rebelling. It is a comfort to know I'm not alone in this. We are powerful people and there is combustion. Just so you know there is someone who wants to see all of it in you, even what's in the bag. I'm not capable of letting you go, so somehow I must re-arrange my soul. Maybe it's time. On a lighter note: Perhaps you and I and Tracy and Richard could move to a small island in Greece and practice free love and organic farming. K.”
“I would be OK with organic farming,” you replied. I laughed for a long time.
Two simultaneous versions of life, always available, the falling apart and the falling together, both always happening at the same time. I still have the scrawled note on torn paper that I wrote that night and put in the Christmas box you gave me, placing it gently onto the red velvet at the bottom:
“I want to love and be loved by Nick. Please let the outcome be what is best for everyone. (But remember last time?) Thank you, Kara.”
The farther away in time our story recedes, the more I see how simple it was. Stop - the problem has been solved. We didn’t speak of fate, but we both felt like our combination might be important for something bigger than us. Was that why we retold each other our origin story nearly every day in those first winter months, maybe even for the whole first burning year? Like children who ask every night to hear the same story over again, neither of us ever got tired of unspooling our miracle.
“Did you know when you stood in the doorway?”
“What about the time I was living over the garage?”
“You mean the time you forced me to watch Hewig And The Angry Inch on movie night?!”
“How about when your wife asked you point blank..?”
“I think it was on the tip of my tongue in your bathroom…”
You were a trained hypnotist so it’s possible that you hypnotized me into falling in love with you. That’s OK. It’s also possible that I am just like all the other crazy deluded broads who try to talk to their dear departeds. But, I’m not trying to get a phone line where I can keep you, and speak to you whenever the table thumps. It’s true that I believe that I am being led, but I am not at all sure by whom. I’m pretty certain there is no whom at all. I am just following the signs.
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