The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced.

There was an unapologetic ethos of consumption in New York City, which the magazine I worked for both satirized and promoted. I found it alluring and alienating by turns.

It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: “You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.” And it made me feel good, like there was a reason for me.

Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.

I wanted to meet those mysteries, too. I wanted to feel the limitless Mongolian steppe spread out in front of me. I wanted to know what it smells like in the morning in Rajasthan. Why? “I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart once wrote in a letter to her husband. “Women must try to do things as men have tried.”

From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.

Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

I began to feel claustrophobic in my own house. I shared our cat’s fevered desperation to find an open window, a door left ajar, a precious opportunity to escape and go . . . where? I am afraid that I will pull this house apart, I wrote in my journal. And then it will be winter and I’ll be outside, freezing.

But his description of a selfish beast who cares only for her own esurient desires haunted me. You just throw away another human being?

It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it’s true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It’s more like, Oh, right.

You have always known this. The only thing that’s mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious.

I remained anxious about her business, but it was a more detached concern now, because my baby was insulated by someone else’s money: wealth, the world’s greatest amniotic sac.

It was milky and sweet and reminded me of the chai I drank in the Himalayas, where I went so long ago, before I was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. I had consumed a steady diet of hashish and Snickers in the mountains, and ended up in a blizzard that killed several hikers but somehow left me only chilly.

It was fun. Sort of. The reason it was only sort of fun was that my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I’d been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.

FINDING YOURSELF SINGLE WHEN YOU’RE USED TO BEING married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone.

But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope.

I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn’t come back.