Page 17 of All the Way to the River

I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong that I fell in love with Rayya Elias while I was married to someone else.

Can we even categorize the process of falling in love—a process that many of us experience as seismic and overwhelming—as right or wrong?

I don’t know.

I do know that I could no more arrest my growing feelings of love toward Rayya than I could stop the tides.

But here’s what I also know: I kept it secret .

And that’s some real addicty shit right there.

Because secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes.

The unfortunate reality of addiction, though, is that all active addicts keep secrets and tell lies.

They really have no choice: An addict must lie in order to protect her supply.

You cannot be an active addict without lying, because your interior world would collapse if you didn’t have access to the substance, person, or behavior that regulates your nervous system, and your exterior world would collapse if people knew what you were up to—because what you are up to is not socially acceptable.

Hell, what you are up to might not even be acceptable to you , which is how addicts learn to lie to themselves before they lie to anyone else.

Thus the addict’s reality becomes split between what she is doing in the shadows (sometimes even behind her own back) and what she is allowing other people to see.

This split started happening within me as soon as I became dependent upon Rayya—and I became dependent upon Rayya very quickly.

Once I saw how powerful and emotionally stabilizing a force she was in my life, I imprinted upon her like a baby goose to its mother.

She was my first phone call in every moment of crisis, my buffer in every social setting, my consigliere, my confidante, my conscience.

And because I was enmeshed in so many messy and unboundaried relationships back then, I always had plenty of emergencies to bring to her attention.

Our story out there in New Jersey might have started off with me trying to save her life, but now I felt like she was saving mine .

(And that, my friends, is what you might call the codependency two-step!)

“Let me break it down for you …,” she used to say, when I would come crying to her over some overwhelming personal disaster or another.

“Babe, I know you come from a softer planet than Earth, and you can be trusting as hell, but the way it works in reality is like this …,” she used to say, pointing out where someone might be deceiving or manipulating me.

“Here’s what you’re gonna do now …,” she used to say, laying out my marching orders, much to my relief.

I could never predict exactly what kind of advice she was going to give me, but it always seemed to be just right.

When I was judgmental and exasperated, she might recommend that I show mercy and kindness.

Once, for example, I came to her in a state of murderous fury with a friend.

I had allowed him to stay at my house for two weeks while I was traveling, and the only thing I’d asked him to do in return— the only thing!

—was to make a spare set of my own keys for me when he had the chance.

An easy enough assignment, it seemed to me, but my friend had failed to do it, even after I’d reminded him about it twice—even after I’d given him the address of a locksmith and told him I would reimburse him!

When I’d asked the guy why he hadn’t done this one easy task for me, he had collapsed in tears about how hard his life was right then and how overwhelmed he was with everything.

For some reason, this had woken up my moral outrage (which has always been a light sleeper, to be honest), and I started ranting about it to Rayya.

“Why the hell couldn’t he just make the fucking keys?” I asked. “How hard is that? He had one job . Why couldn’t he just do it?”

Rayya stopped me in my tracks and turned me to face her.

She put a hand on my arm and said with a tone of even amusement, “Honey, he didn’t make the keys because he can’t .

He just can’t, babe. Not this week, for some reason.

Maybe a month ago he could have done it, or maybe next month he might be capable of it, but this week, he just can’t .

That’s all. You don’t need to throw the entire legal code at him.

See if you can find some mercy in your heart. ”

It melted me.

Because when I saw the compassion in Rayya’s eyes, I remembered whom we were talking about.

The man to whom I’d lent my house was indeed going through a period of great suffering and loss, and everything was probably really hard for him—if not impossible—right then.

I remembered times in my own life when I couldn’t execute the simplest of actions because I was so overwhelmed by stress, trauma, or despair.

“Just make the keys yourself, babe,” said Rayya. “We have to remember to take it easy on people sometimes.”

But other times, Rayya would encourage me to fight back, to set a boundary, to stand up for myself.

She was especially intolerant of people she felt were taking advantage of my overgenerosity.

I remember her pacing around my living room one time in clenched-fist fury at someone who was ripping me off in a business interaction.

She stood over me while I sat at my laptop and she dictated, word for word, a letter of fierce anger and nonnegotiable closure to the situation.

“But I would never write these words to anybody!” I said, reading it over. “It doesn’t even sound like me! It’s too harsh and final!”

“Push Send,” she instructed, while my hands shook in fear. “Push Send right now, babe, and put an end to this story, or else I’m gonna have to go burn that motherfucker’s house down tonight.”

Essentially, Rayya’s advice always seemed to boil down to one of two simple answers: Either I had to grow a spine and set a boundary with a person or I had to grow a heart and accept someone just as they were.

I was never certain which way it was going to go, but somehow she always turned out to be right, because her instincts about people were extraordinary.

So in the end, I always did exactly what she told me to do, while simultaneously going limp with relief at the prospect of not having to figure out the hardest part of my own existence anymore—the part that involved dealing with other people.

How did I ever survive without her? I often wondered.

And how would I ever survive without her in the future if she went away?

She couldn’t go away.

I couldn’t bear it if she went away.

But how could I make sure she never went away?

How could I make sure that I never again had to return to the empty, windswept tundra of fear and anxiety upon which I had struggled alone for years?

This problem felt psychologically urgent to me (but of course it did; the hallmark of addiction is always urgency!), but it also felt perplexing from an ethical standpoint, because Rayya did not belong to me.

And I belonged to someone else—someone I cared about deeply.

Looking back now, I can see that this might have been a good time to start telling the truth.

There were some very important and difficult conversations that I might’ve had back then within my marriage, and also with Rayya.

Conversations about my growing feelings of love toward my best friend.

Conversations that might have forced all of us to make huge changes in our lives, or at least might have brought the truth to the surface more swiftly and cleanly.

But I was not remotely capable of such conversations.

I had no skills for that kind of rigorous honesty, nor any courage for it.

I can say in all earnestness that I would’ve rather died than told anyone how I felt about Rayya.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I didn’t want to get hurt, I didn’t want to lose anything I already had, and I didn’t want to lose anybody.

So instead of being transparent, I did exactly what I’d been doing my whole life to survive: I strategized and manipulated and kept secrets in order to feel that I was controlling the situation.

So … in the end, how did I get Rayya to not leave my church and go back to New York City after her first summer in New Jersey?

Like so many eminent New Jersey residents before me, I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

I invited her to stay at the church for another nine months, for free.

And how did I justify this offer—to myself, to her, to everyone?

I told her she needed to write a book.

To be fair, it wasn’t such a bad idea. Rayya was one of the most gifted storytellers I have ever met, and her life was positively cinematic in its ups and downs.

I loved her stories, and I thought the world might love them, too.

So I suggested she live at the church for the rest of the year and write a memoir about her life’s journey.

I said, “Give me a first draft after nine months. That’ll be your rent.”

“But I don’t know how to write a book!” Rayya protested.

“Of course you do,” I promised. “It’s easy!

All you have to do is say what happened, using your natural voice.

Just pretend you’re talking to me. You’ve written songs before, and movie scripts.

It’s the same thing. In fact, it’s easier, because it’s just straight-up storytelling, which you’re great at.

Let’s just call this an official artist’s residency.

Let’s call it a grant . I’ll help you with it!

And once you’re finished with the book, I’ll send it to my agent. ”

Remembering those words now, I feel a sense of vertigo, of nausea.

I recognize this sensation as shame .

Because I can see very clearly what I was up to back then, and I cannot call it integrity.

This was me attempting to manipulate somebody else’s life.

This was me pulling the strings of someone else’s longings in order to get what I believed I needed—which was for her to stay .

Rather than speaking honestly about my feelings and needs, I kept my motives hidden behind a gesture of grand generosity.

And what choice did she have but to say yes?

Wait, let me rethink that.

I do not mean to imply that Rayya had no agency in the matter.

Of course Rayya had a choice! She was never anybody’s victim, and I’m not powerful enough to control anybody’s destiny—no matter how hard I try.

And we must not rule out the possibility that she might have been playing her own subtle games of manipulation in order to get what she wanted out of me .

But let’s also remember her circumstances: She was fresh off a divorce, her finances had taken a hit, and she had been living in a tiny studio apartment that literally faced a brick wall.

She was almost fifty, and her body was battered from a lifetime of drug addiction, street living, and hepatitis C.

It was getting harder for her to stay on her feet all day, cutting hair.

And she always felt like she was failing as an artist.

Now here comes someone offering the chance to be a creator at last and to take nearly a year off from work.

Here comes someone offering friendship, community, and access to a glamorous life.

Here comes someone who thinks you’re awesome and tells you so all the time.

Here comes someone offering a beautiful place to live, creative encouragement, insider access to the New York publishing world, and perhaps even the prospect of fame and success.

( Success : something Rayya longed for so deeply that she had the word tattooed on her arm in Arabic.) Here comes someone saying, “Your story is valuable! You are valuable!”

And it was true—Rayya’s story was valuable, and she was valuable.

But that’s not why I was making the offer.

I was making the offer because I already believed that I could not live without this person, and I didn’t know any other means of ensuring that she wouldn’t leave me but to produce a tempting package of promises and incentives that might, just might, get her to stay in my life a tiny bit longer.

And that—as much as it hurts my heart to admit it—is the truth.