Note: I wrote this more than two weeks ago. I contemplated not publishing this one, but I decided it is relevant and needs to be read. I have not copied a single page of Anna Karenina. I have instead been completing the revision of my own manuscript.
One week ago, I finished copying Part Three of Anna Karenina, 353 pages by my bood, satisfied to end on the last line of the back of my own sheet of paper, a good sense of closure.
The next day, I woke up knowing that I was leaving Tolstoy behind for the weekend. My husband and I drove to Michigan. We went cross-country skiing, my first time, and played several games of cribbage, many of which I won. We ate bagels for breakfast, and on Sunday, after springing our clocks forward, stayed in bed reading until 10:30am.
Since coming home, I have had difficulty returning to the pages of Anna. I'm still working, a couple of pages a day, but the romance is gone. I have even contemplated giving up the project. Not because it is too hard, but because I realized the peace and calm of not having Tolstoy in my head. My mulling and contemplating of the story, and his life, and his family had bloomed far beyond the page.
I did not come to this realization on my own. My husband was the one who called me out. I was sitting in the kitchen one morning, hard at work copying pages, trying to get to page 400 by the end of the month, when Mark leaned back against the counter and looked at me.
"Our house doesn't seem like a very happy place lately."
I was shocked. I was feeling pretty good about things. The kids were doing well in school. 17 got a small part in the school play. 13 has saved the money to take a school trip over spring break. The house was clean, and things were pretty quiet in our life. I began to mutter about my own work, and that maybe it was him and not me or the rest of the family. Nothing was resolved.
But after he left for work, I began to think about what he saw when he walked in the door: me, head down, madly copying the work of another man.
Me talking about how I wanted to go to Russia, even as I was telling him we couldn't really take time to get away as a couple.
Me, me, me.
Except not me. My own writing never seemed to make it off the To-Do list. I began each day with Tolstoy and ended with the dinner dishes, falling into bed so exhausted that I couldn't even read a page before falling asleep. Mark would remove the book from my face and turn off the light. So I sent him an email and told him that I was sorry, that while my work was important to me, so was our marriage, that I was looking forward to a weekend away, to getting out of my head.
When we returned from Michigan, I moved Tolstoy to the end of my daily schedule. This has been one of my most productive weeks as a creative person. Not only have I waded through the revision of the last story in my collection, I have sewed several new pieces for the shop, cleaned out a couple of closets, knitted three new dishcloths (while watching The Voice) and finished reading two books.
So when Vronsky bumped into Anna's husband while sneaking into the Karenins' house for a rendezvous, I felt annoyed. Let's get on with it already. Let's wrap this up. Some people have lives to live.
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