Venus in the Afternoon

Anya’s Angel

132 Anya’sAngel My mother once told me that the way she understood it, we were living in the onl y existing physical universe, which was but the palest r eflection of the many non-physical universes that existed. That there was, however, a throughflow between the worlds, and just as some spir its and acts of the divine trickled down to us, so did our actions affect the other layers of worlds. It was late when she said this, past midnight. She was sitting in the kitchen,a notebook in front of her. She had decided to study kabbalah. She couldn’t talk to my father about these things. He had built a r eputation on his agnosticism and his particular bent had grown a name, had turned his name into a noun. So when I would come upon my mother in the kitchen at all hours of the night, her glasses sliding down her nose, the books open before her, it was like coming upon her in an affair, only worse; a body is much more easily disengaged than angels and demigods and the r emnants of worlds that now c lung to her. I wondered if perhaps she was going to die , if she kne w and was not telling us and needed to map out the r ealms into which she thought she might step . I wondered if perhaps it was to esc ape us, if w e exhausted her—the constant str eam of my father’s scholarship, my own incessant wander ings and Anya’s Angel 133 returnings; if having been only partially alive by the side of my father for years, she was finally claiming a territory onto which he would not follow her. As she moved away f rom us, she became gradually more alive, and I was caught in the ironic moment of knowing what she must have felt at the f irst signs of my unstoppable separation and departure, the departure of her onl y son. Observing her at the kitchen table late at night with her books, her hair coming down out of a loose barrette, I felt that I had to let her go, that if I intimated that in any way I needed her to be the rock against which I was to kic k off yet again, she would cast aside her books and I w ould have her grounding, her growing weightedness on my conscience. So I held still and let her dr ift away. As did my father in his silent, impenetrable way, and she looked down at us, both accusing and relieved that we could have so little need of her , as if perhaps w e had been tr icking her all along , holding her hostage when in fact we could handle our own angst, navigate our own way in the world. Sometimes I was tempted to draw c lose to her again and hide from my father’s unceasing disapproval of me, of my lack of commitment to any discipline . Especially when he w ould emerge from his cave of a study, his tall frame bent from hours of hunching over a desk, when he would blink at us, remember slowly who we were, then launch into a lectur e perfect in its logic,flawless in its arguments about how I was wasting my life , how in doing so many things, I was actually doing nothing. “It is an illusion, Adam,” he would say, “that one c an in this way acquire wisdom, acquire any kind of universal perspective . If you truly want to understand, to know, to be able to see, choose one discipline and master it. In it the entir e universe will be reflected.” 1 3 4 V E N U S I N T H E A F T E R N O O N These were the moments when I wanted to side with my mother, stand in her gr owing light and say something to my father about travel being the key to my soul ’s work. But ultimately I couldn’t, because I wanted no par t at this time in my life in discourses on soul spar ks and states of consciousness. I had been surrounded for too many years with lofty and cerebral endeavors, and it had lef t me with a cor poreal hunger, with a desire for landscapes of...