Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,29

those words together, she lying pale in her blue nightie and holding on to his freckled hands, he with his face so close to hers and so full of love. There was something that happened that was beyond me, but that I understood anyway. It’s like the way you can read scientific principles that may be beyond you intellectually, but that your poet’s soul embraces.

After his wife died, Clem (as he asked me to call him) told me that he had very much appreciated the way I’d been able to rally his wife where others had failed. I got her to eat a bit, to get out of bed and sit by the window and look at the view, to allow a brief visit from this grandchild or that. Whenever she smiled, I felt a quick uptick inside myself: it felt good to provide her with whatever small pleasures I could.

Clem suggested that I become a motivational speaker, and that in fact he would be willing to hire me himself to do inspirational retreats with his sales force. At first it seemed a bizarre suggestion, but then the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea—why not try to help others be their best selves, why not turn what seemed to be a natural proclivity into a good-paying profession? I’d get to travel a lot, too, which I’d never been able to do before; those retreats were held in beautiful and interesting places. One time it might be a secluded abbey surrounded by layers of lush green, where you could hear the Divine Office chanted at specified hours throughout the day. The next time might be at the Arizona Biltmore or in some pink towering structure in Miami so close to the beach the ocean seemed to be in your room with you. The job took me to Alaska and Hawaii, and more than once to luxury hotels abroad: London, Paris, Rome, Madrid. After I had worked for Clem for ten years, he died, and I didn’t care to work for his son, who lacked the qualities that made me so admire his father. Using all I had learned about the tenderness and fragility and vagaries of the human spirit, the needs and frustrations that we all share, I started writing self-help books. Then I began doing speaking gigs as well, based on those books.

I worked because I needed to, of course, but I also worked because it was the way I communicated best. I had always had a shy love of people; they broke my heart a million times a day. But from the time I was a little kid, I was a loner. I never liked recess. My favorite teacher in elementary school let me stay in from it; I always wanted to stay in. It’s not that I’m antisocial; it’s that I care too much, and so I have a lot of fears. It takes a lot for me to really get close to someone in an honest and undefended way.

A couple of years ago, there was a day when I had a lot of work to do. But I ignored it and took the whole day off. I loved that day, the ease and deliberateness of it, the way it put me in touch with my species in a way that was not virtual. Instead of talking to an imaginary reader, I talked over the fence with my next-door neighbor about gardening. Later, I sat in the backyard and listened to the birds, watched the movement of the clouds and the progression of the line of shade that moved across the back deck. I put a CD on the stereo and listened to it the way I used to listen to music: eyes closed, attentive to the nuances in a song, the way that a tiny shift in volume or diction or timing or chord structure could enlarge the feeling, the meaning.

I went to a bookstore and browsed. I ended up buying Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, because I’d never read it. I went to a coffee shop and sat at a little table with my latte and read for an hour and then I closed the book and engaged in conversation with anyone who wanted to talk: a young woman with hair to her waist and wide brown eyes who had just moved here; a man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank who made you forget his disability in the