The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  I nodded and listened, maybe half listened, the way an old married couple half listens. My body ages, I accumulate wrinkles and secrets. I live in the in-between. Between the presidency and Central Intelligence. Between a lover and an ex-husband. Between war and peace. Everywhere and nowhere.

  AUGUST 12

  Jack and I had dinner in the White House with Dave Powers. He serves as clown in Jack’s Irish mafia. If it is Kenny O’Donnell’s job to handle every aspect of Jack’s life, it is Dave Powers’s to keep him amused. Over roast chicken and mashed potatoes, Dave all but spit his food out all over the fine White House china, chewing, gabbing, guffawing, and keeping the president in stitches. I will attempt to repeat a joke.

  A man and woman meet at a bar and go back to the man’s house. Walking into his bedroom, she discovers the entire wall covered with stuffed bunnies: big bunnies on the bottom shelf, medium-sized bunnies in the middle, and little ones at the top. This man is so sensitive! she thinks, and proceeds to make passionate love to him. When it’s over, she smiles and asks, “How was it for you?” The man replies: “Help yourself to anything on the middle shelf.”

  Jack cracked up, Dave Powers cracked up, I think I smiled. Perhaps it’s a man thing. Or else I am a terrible joke person. But I was thrilled to see Jack laughing and happy, which is only the first part of Dave Powers’s job. The second part of the job is disappearing discreetly, so he left when the meal was over, leaving Jack and me alone. We wandered into the bedroom, supervised by Abraham Lincoln, and I undid Jack’s tie. Such an unnecessary item, ties, yet so sexy to undo. I threw the necktie on the floor with a sweeping gesture, the same floor where Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt once walked, and began to undo his buttons. “I understand the Emancipation Proclamation better now,” I said. Maybe I’m a joke person after all.

  AUGUST 21

  “Everybody’s doing a brand-new dance, now . . . come on, baby, do the loco-motion.”

  I was in my bra and panties. Tim was bare-chested with a necktie wrapped around his head, Indian-style. We were doing the loco-motion at the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking Boston Commons, trying to avoid smashing into tables and lamps. The song had come up on the clock radio in perfect synchronicity with the magic mushroom moment. Tim had placed magic mushrooms in our tea, we had drunk the foul brew slowly, and the occasion called out for a brand-new dance.

  “The Aztec word for these is God’s flesh.” Tim had pulled his bits of mushroom from a plastic bag and placed them carefully in our teacups. “The scientific word for them is psilocybin. It unleashes the neurotransmitter in the brain known as serotonin.”

  It had begun with a return to Boston to replenish psychedelic supplies. My vision for a Washington wives’ LSD club was burning in me, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near Harvard. Tim has become a figure of controversy there, ignoring my urgings of discretion, discretion being the better part of Valium and every other drug, I joked to him, but he is even more foolhardy than I am. I told him to meet me in room 717, my usual room at the Ritz-Carlton. The mushrooms were a surprise.

  He has journeyed far beyond the province of clinical psychologist. He is a revolutionary now, a propagandist for chemical evolution, a shaman of ecstasy, abandoning the fleeting designations society places on experts: professor, psychologist, doctor. As I waited for the mushrooms to hit, wondering what form of power was about to explode in my brain from these bits of plant material, Tim read from a document he had written, a formal, oratorical document he called “The Declaration of Evolution”: “‘The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the Planet Earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored.’”

  As Tim railed against the mendacious men who rule the planet, I poured us a fine cabernet from the Ritz-Carlton cellar. I have spent my life in the confines of this contradiction. At Grey Towers, my turreted family home, the plight of workers and miners was debated daily within the walls of a castle. Forgoing comfort does not answer injustice. Those moldering in shacks in West Virginia or falling in the rice paddies of Vietnam, far, far from the gardens of Boston Commons, would not be helped by the forswearing of cabernet.

  “‘These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals, and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of Earth.’”

  It was a slow-motion explosion. Light began to emanate from Tim. I saw light streaming through the window from Boston Commons, wrap its waves around my chocolate-colored overnight bag, around the tweed club chair, around the king-size bed all pillowed up and stiffly made up by hotel staff.

  “‘For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas. In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.’”

  I felt euphoric. I lay down on the Persian carpet and studied the ceiling. This was how life was supposed to feel, I thought, the repressions of Cord and the cold men a tragic error, life’s destruction masquerading as its protection.

  “‘In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.’”

  “Yes, they have,” I said. “Timothy, stop reading. It’s becoming just words.”

  “‘In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.’”

  I laughed. “What’s wrong with sugar? It’s so sweet. So sweet. So sweet.” I kept repeating the words, my thoughts spinning outward like a radio program I had no interest in listening to.

  “‘They hate beauty. They hate sex. They hate life.’”

  “The caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly!”

  At my own brief declaration of deep truth, Tim put down the paper, and his serious face shifted to a large grin.

  “How beautiful everything is,” I said, and he agreed.

  “Reality is just social fabrication,” he said. “You could be anybody or anything. You could be me and I could be you.”

  I pulled off my capri pants and blouse, untied his tie, and wrapped it around his head, unbuttoned his shirt and flung it across the room. Then I turned on the clock radio and the loco-motion began.

  AUGUST 28

  He has a radiance that seems independent of his body. When you have sex with Jack, you’re making love to his radiance as much as you are to his body. Jack took off his brace and tried doing it from on top. I had my hands on his butt, which has absolutely no hair on it, and he came quickly, turning over and then dozing off. I didn’t want to leave—it was only nine o’clock—so I started reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception while Jack snored lightly. Then he opened his eyes. He has uncanny control over his sleep and waking. He asked what I was reading. I showed him the cover. I told him Huxley had written it after taking mescaline in West Hollywood in 1953. He had gazed at the mystery that no words can encapsulate and proceeded to put it into words. Jack smiled indulgently, a smile only half the wattage of the great gleaming of teeth the world has come to know. It was a smile that seemed to say he was just an Irish politician who had married upward, charged with the incomprehensible task of protecting civilization from nuclear annihilation, and in the name of fondling my rosy white tits, both of which he has grown rather fond of, he would indulge a bit of female voodoo, but not too much.

  He started dressing and suddenly seemed so vulnerable, not at all superhuman. I wondered if I was out of my mind, trying to extend him any further than he already was. He bore the weight of the earth on his shoulders, a man already sick and weakened, and here comes this psychedelic cheerleader into the Lincoln Bedroom, pulling off her dress, fucking him, and then reading excerpts from The Doors of Perception. He was tying his shoes—I don’t know where he intended to go after I left, but I do
know him well enough to know that wherever he is, he thinks he should be someplace else, and I decided to read to him. I read the passage that gave the book its title, a quotation from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

  It dawned on me that I was here in the White House, the nerve center of the free world, and that fucking the president was the least subversive of my acts. I was actually proposing neurological treason at the heart of power. As Tim Leary said, “The managers of consciousness, from the Vatican to Harvard, have been in this business for a long time and they’re not about to give up their monopoly.”

  Kenny O’Donnell knocked abruptly, and I was suddenly out the door.

  SEPTEMBER 4

  My bluebirds were up early this morning, mama bird passing on seeds and insects to her babies in the big tree that leans toward the Potomac. Tony and I were walking the towpath. Sisters together again. No husbands, no spies, no luminaries, no drunks, no politicians, just sisters walking. The ancient canal created a private pathway for us, we were teenagers once again at Grey Towers, feeding our horses and gathering wildflowers for the dinner table.

  We haven’t spent much time together of late. Tony’s in her pottery studio every day. I am painting and preparing for a show in May. She and Ben live at the center of the Georgetown social swirl—they are features at dinners and parties at least four nights a week. The nights she’s not with Ben, he’s in the newsroom at the Post, and she’s at her Gurdjieff meetings. Gurdjieff meetings are supposed to be secret, esoteric knowledge handed down orally by adepts through the ages, but she has told me about them. Even spirituality is a secret in this town.

  Yes, she has told me of Carlyle Le Marque, her teacher. She spoke about me to Carlyle, and he said I could come to a meeting. But I’m not comfortable with “teachers,” gurus, masters, leaders, sages, enlightened nincompoops. I’m a divorced woman. I’ll restate that: I’m a free woman. Who needs another man telling me what to do, even if he was Gurdjieff’s personal student in Paris, even if he received “a direct transmission” of The Work from the master himself? That’s what Tony calls it. The Work.

  I once asked Tim Leary if he had ever heard of Gurdjieff. “A realized being,” Tim had called him. “A marvelous rogue from the Secret Brotherhoods of Central Asia.” That’s all I know about Gurdjieff.

  So I asked Tony how The Work was going, and she said she wasn’t supposed to talk about it.

  “You’re getting boring,” I said.

  “Boring is good. Carlyle says we’re nothing, our self as we conceive it really doesn’t even exist, and as soon as we realize that, there’s a possibility.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being something. Of breaking through our mechanical nature.”

  “How?”

  “By just being present.”

  “OK, I’m present now. I’m walking a dirt path next to the canal, I’m watching filthy water flow, and I’m just being present. No thoughts. Is that The Work?”

  “Just be present, Mary. Someone once asked Carlyle what his greatest moment was, and he said right now.”

  We walked silently. The topic held no more interest for me, nor apparently for Tony. Then she said: “You know, Mary, I think the president likes me.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t want to cause any trouble—I’m trying to stay present and observe myself, because I love attention, and I don’t want Ben to get jealous. But whenever the four of us are together, Ben sits with Jackie, and Jack always sits next to me with this smile—he looks at me with this big grin, as if I were his long-lost love or something. Jackie once said Jack considers me the perfect woman. How weird is that?”

  I got that familiar pang again, that diabolical demon living in the solar plexus called jealousy. Abandonment. Some longing programmed into my nervous system long ago, and now the button was pressed. We are all jukeboxes filled with sad records. An ironic turn of events, jealousy and nausea erupting just seconds after a discussion of presence and freedom. Can I just be present and observe my feelings, detached? As Tim once told me, “You already know the truth about your nervous system and the worthlessness of jealousy. So when’s it going to kick in?”

  Timothy and Alan Watts and Carlyle whatever-his-name-is, they all say the same thing. The affairs of another person, be it Jack, Jackie, Tony, or any other sentient being on the planet, are really none of my business. And the universe tests us incessantly.

  But behind the pang of jealousy, I run headlong into the wall called my relationship with Jack. It is a wall of lies that separates me from my sister, even if my silence is vital to the health of the country. Which suddenly puts me in the same league as Cord and James Jesus Angleton. I fuck, they kill, but we’re all lying for national security.

  Is it legitimate to wall off one fact, I wondered, but be open about everything else? Just one lie, and then flow in truthfulness in every direction around it?

  We turned to head back, in unison—I’m not sure who initiated the action. Sisters in telepathy.

  “Come to a meeting,” Tony finally said. “Carlyle said I could bring you. It’s really a privilege. I want to share The Work with you.”

  “I don’t know, Tony. I’m on another path. I’m fascinated with psychedelics and the promise they hold for all mankind, not just working on my little self. It feels so small. So stifling.”

  “Carlyle says when you work on yourself, you are working on the world.”

  “Yes, Carlyle and his secret Work. I’m sick of secrets, Tony.”

  SEPTEMBER 16

  Today I launched Chantilly Lace, gathering the wives of Georgetown for our great psychedelic mission. Lorraine Cooper. Evangeline Bruce. Polly Wisner. Katharine Graham. Pamela Harriman. Georgette LeBlanc. Anne Truitt. A small sea of femininitude sipping afternoon cocktails in Polly’s living room. I told them we were gathered for a unique purpose. To end the Cold War.

  “Is that all, Mary?” asked Vangie Bruce. “And for that I gave up tennis?”

  Lady of the tip-top remark, long and elegant, Vangie is the anti-Mary, so utterly at home with sheer existence is she. I do not occur to myself as so jaunty, so intrinsically cheerful, I who approach life as a stranger sometimes, in vital need of instruction. I can layer colors onto canvas, I am confident of that—I can sculpt words on paper, I can think fiercely when the pilot light ignites in my brain, but I wasn’t built to glide through life with the thoroughbred ease of Evangeline Bruce. To gaze into the face of stupidity and smile. To offer more drinks as talented people bow before mediocre ones, as intelligent women shut their mouths while ignorant men carry on. I cannot, and thus I find myself fascinated with Evangeline Bruce. Perhaps she is the key to Chantilly Lace, the secret agent who could mobilize the women of Georgetown, endowed with a sleight of hand I don’t possess, or is it a sleight of estrogen? She grew up in embassies. She frolicked through girlhood with curtsies and grown-up conversations in parlors of import, at parties of import. Hostessing is like her second skin. Can I yoke it to acid instead of bourbon?

  I told my friends that the only hope for the world is intelligent women, and they murmured approval. I said we are on the brink of ending life itself. How odd it sounded, apocalyptic utterances spoken amid Polly Wisner’s pewter and candlesticks, her formal draperies, her walls of colonial portraits, unknown people long dead. I suddenly loathed the colonial frippery of Georgetown—the corny nostalgia that masks the brink of nuclear annihilation we all inhabit, undiscussed, just as we all inhabit lives that will end, undiscussed.

  But I spoke. All that I had thought about—all that had been instilled in me by a radical family pontificating endlessly on peace and justice, on the stench of lies and corruption in politics that it was our job to erase, all the genes of Pinchots past—came pouring forth like a desperate sales pitch for the preservation of civilization. Humanity must decide every
day that it wants to live, I said. Where danger is, there also grows the saving power. The saving power is LSD, I said, it is the only hope we have of stopping the men we sleep with from plunging us into nightmare. LSD holds out a glimpse into the unity of life that we all are blind to, consumed and buried as we are, playing survival games.

  There was silence. Pamela Harriman spoke first. “Dear, I have a hard enough time at bridge.”

  The women tittered, and I realized my mistake. Pamela Harriman could never be part of the plan. She is devolution itself dressed in pearls.

  “Isn’t this all a bit artificial, taking this drug?” asked Lorraine Cooper. “Like I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was!”

  The cackling built, and I realized how easily conversations get away. I was a strangely serious woman, staking the next stage of human evolution on a group of women committed to little more than sipping gin and tonics and planning dinners. But Pinchots press on. Except that when resisted, something in me shuts down even as my mouth continues, so my explanations of LSD felt dry even to me.