1987 to 1994

"The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." —Katha-Upanishad.

I lay in bed this afternoon with a bad cold and I thought about it: “The Razor’s Edge” by Somerset Maugham, “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton, and the whole question of “what if.” What if I had never read those two books – would I have married my husband? Would I have taken that job down at the Falls? Who would I be today?

In 1987, the year I graduated from high school, I ended an affair with a married man: my high school art teacher. He was 35 years my senior, and I suspect he’d been sleeping with students for years. This was the same year my parents spent my entire $10,000 in college savings on I know not what (without asking); the year my father’s mother died in a south Minneapolis hotel room; and the year I met the man I thought I was destined to love forever.

In spring of 1994, the year my sister should have graduated high school, she went to the emergency room at North Memorial with a fever and a headache and did not emerge for seven weeks. The man I was supposed to marry drove to Iowa and celebrated his wedding in grand style, with another woman. I quit art school to take a job in marketing and public relations, and three months later found myself living in a truly squalid Dinkytown rooming house, on the verge of bankruptcy. My boyfriend was a writer from Chicago with a B&D fixation, and for lack of ideas I was back at the University.

Over the years in between, I met the man who (years later) turned out to be my spouse, though we never really dated. My three remaining grandparents died, one by one in rapid succession. I expressed my grief over these and other losses by pissing away close to $15,000 in student loan money: I drank, I partied, I dressed very well and blacked out days and days of memory. My health completely deteriorated and in 1992 I had a brush with suicide. I also put in close to 10,000 hours of volunteer service to the community, which in retrospect might be what really kept me alive.

I read my future husband’s copy of “The Razor’s Edge” in 1993. In 1995 I read “The Age of Innocence,” given to me by the man I loved more than anything else on earth, shortly before he celebrated his first wedding anniversary. Maugham’s well-known novel takes reference from the great cultural disillusionments of World War I and the stock market crash of 1929. “The Age of Innocence” won a Pullitzer in 1921 for its depiction of a fading New York aristocracy at the turn of the century. Both books address material versus spiritual wealth, and eros versus agape – books given to me at an incredibly difficult point in my life by two very different people, both of whom said they loved me. In ’93, Ron left for three years of service in the Peace Corps; in ’95 I was told Carl’s wife was expecting their first child, and like Wharton’s protagonist Ellen I knew it was time to cut myself off for good from Carl and the hope that Fate would somehow intervene in my favor.

The moment came in 1992– standing in front of a dish-rack full of knives with a roaring void at my back. I was hallucinating: the white-noise sound of oblivion and the rumbling of floorboards slipping like tectonic plates and crumbling beneath my feet. I could see it happening, could see the knives gleaming in the rack like answered prayers that promised relief. I’d been writing a letter, begging some guy (there’d been a number of them) to reconsider. And I’d just done too much by this time – I had no sense of self, no dignity or self-preservation, just the propped-up façade of someone who’d been lucky enough to get a few good gigs and was adept at throwing money around. Backed up against a wall of grief, between therapists at the time. So I don’t quite know why I didn’t finish the job. Maybe because the person I thought to call turned out to be suicidal himself some 10 years later, and it was my task to return the favor, the held hand and the safe couch to sleep on. Maybe I chickened out, running from that final answer the way I’d run from all the answers to questions of What If and Why.

I had no public faith in God. I was living at that time in an apartment over a liquor store in Northeast Minneapolis, the sixth of ten apartments (over seven years.) I had never stopped running – my high school graduation ceremony was the starting gun. But the winter of 1992 was the desert in which I’d got lost, and once I knew I didn’t want to die, I had to learn how to live. I had to wake up. By the time my sister went into an encephalitic coma, losing eight days of her memory to steroids and ice packs that reduced the deadly fever, I knew something I hadn’t before – in part because I’d read two books.
There is a third part to this piece that is still being edited. Stay tuned if interested.