“You want to borrow my Jag?”
“I still like to think of it as our Jag.”
“I still like to think of myself as an innocent young slip of a girl. That doesn’t make it so. The Jag is mine. But since I’m going away you may as well use it. I keep it in the same garage. Keys are in the bowl in the entry hall.” She studied me, her eyes narrowing. “Besides, it might do you good to see Reggie.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I don’t believe you ever got her out of your system.”
“Sure, I did.”
“Nay, not so. Do you remember your author photo for Our Family Enterprise? You standing on the roof of your brownstone in that beat-up old leather motorcycle jacket you used to wear?”
“Actually, it was a 1933 Werber A-2 flight jacket that I found in a vintage clothing store in Provincetown. And I still wear it.”
“You look all full of hoo-hah and vinegar in that photo. Tough, defiant, sure of yourself . . .”
“Your point?” I asked, starting to think I should have just asked Avis if there’s such a thing as a hypoallergenic car.
“You don’t look that way anymore, darling.”
“How do I look?”
“Like someone who has doubts.”
“That’s to be expected. I no longer have the courage of my ignorance. I’m ten years older.”
“Are you any wiser?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that I am. I was much smarter then.”
Her green eyes locked onto mine. “Has it occurred to you that this long creative dry spell of yours has coincided with Reggie’s departure from your life?”
“We split up before I started Our Family Enterprise. She wasn’t in my life when I wrote it.”
“Like hell she wasn’t. She inspired you to write it. You dedicated it to her.”
“Only because I didn’t want to dedicate it to my parents. My father in particular.” I sipped my Scotch, gazing out the windows at the darkness of Central Park and the lights of Fifth Avenue beyond it. “Merilee, you’re not suggesting that Reggie was my muse, are you?”
“I’m suggesting that some part of you, deep down inside, has never let go of her. You and she still have some unfinished business. For all I know maybe you belong back together.”
“We don’t. Once was plenty for me.”
“I’m suggesting that you ought to attend to it. This is your chance, Hoagy.”
“Merilee, I don’t want to get back together with Reggie. I’m over her.”
“No, you’re not. Women know these things. Men don’t. You’re clumsy oafs.” Merilee studied me across the coffee table, her brow furrowing. “I’m trying to help you, Hoagy. I’m thinking about your future. Our future, if we have one. You haven’t written one single word that you’re proud of since the day we met. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think that hurts me deeply? I want to bring out the best in you. Somehow, she did. Figure out how she did it. And get her out of your system—however you need to do that.”
I stared at her. “You make it sound as if you want me to . . .”
“However you need to do that,” she repeated. “I’ll be in Budapest until the seventeenth of next month. I’ll leave a message on your machine when I get settled there to let you know how you can reach me. You know how I hate it when we’re out of touch.” Her green eyes shined at me. “Good luck, darling. I genuinely mean that. For Richard Aintree’s sake, for your sake and for ours.”
Chapter Two
It was sunny and bracingly cold the next morning as I worked the Jag through the sluggish traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Merilee’s Scottish-born mechanic in East Hampton kept its 3.4-litre S engine tuned to perfection. I love that damned car. When I’m behind the wheel of the XK150 it’s still my season in the sun. I’m me.
I wore my shearling greatcoat and my shearling-lined ankle boots from Tanino Crisci since the Jag didn’t have a very effective heating system, what with it being a vintage British-made ragtop. Actually it had no heating system. Lulu was curled up in the biscuit-colored leather passenger seat in her Fair Isle sweater vest.
As I drove I found myself remembering when Reggie and I first met at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop back in the summer of ’76, back when Nixon, Watergate and Vietnam were still hanging over all of us like a poisonous, odorless miasma. I was two years out of college and convinced that I was pretty hot shit. I’d published two short stories in the New Yorker, had drinks in the lobby of the Algonquin with the legendary Alberta Pryce and now the Antioch people were inviting me out to the farm country of Yellow Springs, Ohio, to teach short story writing for a week. Regina Aintree, who’d just won the Walt Whitman Award for her first collection, Don’t Go Home, was there to teach poetry. She was young and gifted. She was also big-time literary royalty.
We were billeted at the same quaint little inn in Yellow Springs, walking distance from the Antioch College campus. I showed up way late. Missed the mandatory meet-and-greet the evening before classes began. Barely even got there in time to teach my first morning class. I had to ride my bad black 1973 Norton Commando 850 all night in order to make it. When I pulled in shortly after 8:00 am, I was wearing my vintage Werber leather flight jacket, a grease-stained T-shirt, torn jeans and Chippewa engineer boots. I was unshaven, windblown and filthy. The innkeeper, who was aghast, gave me a cup of coffee. I smoked unfiltered Chesterfields in those days. I lit one with Grandfather’s Ronson Varaflame chrome lighter and as I stood there in the parlor, drinking my coffee and smoking, Reggie came downstairs from her room wearing a tight little tank top with nothing underneath it, tight jeans, an exotic assortment of bracelets and necklaces and a pair of rubber flip-flops. She was barely five feet tall and built like a nimble ballerina. She had a thin, pale face with an aristocratic nose. A long curtain of shiny, jet black hair marked by a single streak of premature white that made her appear as if she’d been struck by lightning. And she had amazingly huge blue eyes. When she made it to the foot of the stairs, she stopped, looked at me and stared, those huge eyes of hers widening. I looked at her and stared. Right away, I knew my life had just changed.
“Finish your coffee, Stewie,” she commanded me in a voice that was unexpectedly husky. “We’ll be late for class.”
“I should wash up before I go.”
Reggie squinted at me as if she were regarding me from a great distance. “Why on earth would you want to do that? Come on, I’ll show you where your classroom is.” Then she took me by the hand and walked me to the Antioch campus, which was very peaceful on a warm summer morning. “Do you have any idea what the subject of your first lecture will be?”
“No idea at all. Haven’t given it a thought.”
“Neither have I. I like to plunge in headfirst. Otherwise the fledglings will get bored. They can get bored at home for free, right, Stewie?”
“Right. By the way, my friends call me Hoagy.”
“As in Carmichael?”
“As in the cheesesteak.”
“I’ll meet you after class, Stewie. Don’t try to find me. I’ll find you.”
And she did, because we were about to become a couple. It was already understood. Same as it was understood that she was never, ever going to call me anything but Stewie.
I took her for a long ride on my Norton that night through the meandering farm roads outside of Yellow Springs. She loved to go fast. Loved the feel of the wind on her face. She didn’t believe in wearing a helmet. That made two of us. When we made it back to the inn shortly before midnight, she informed me that she possessed two hits of orange sunshine. We dropped them without a second’s hesitation and strolled hand in hand back over to the campus so that we could lie on the vast expanse of lawn and gaze up at the moon and the stars. I remember that we argued like crazy over which flavor of Fizzies we’d thought was the best when we were kids. My favorite had been strawberry. Hers was cherry. She informed me that her mouth still tasted of cherry if I cared to check it out for myself.
And I did. And she was right. And my own, she assured me, still tasted like strawberry. God, dropping acid was fun. Without question the most fun I ever had with my clothes on. Or off. We shed ours and lay there naked on the damp grass, gazing into each other’s eyes in the moonlight. Reggie’s huge blue eyes shimmered so vividly that I fumbled around in the pocket of my jeans for Grandfather’s lighter and flicked it on, the better to behold the magic. I saw an entire universe in those eyes. Constantly shifting mirrors of color. Op art and pop art, swirling paisleys, primitive cave paintings. I saw flowers bloom, wither and die. I saw R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont truckin’ along in their bulbous, oversized shoes. I’d dropped acid many times before, but I’d never, ever experienced anything like Reggie Aintree’s eyes.
She was the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
We had wild, amazing sex on the lawn until shortly before dawn, when we decided we should put our clothes on and head back to the inn, where we took a shower together, singing “The Crystal Ship” by The Doors at the top of our lungs and waking up everyone in the place and causing quite some scandal.
Neither of us was invited back to Antioch.
We were inseparable after that. New York City was home for both of us. I had my crappy fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-Third Street. She had a dark little room on the third floor of the Chelsea Hotel. The city was grimy, impoverished and dangerous in those days. Gangs roamed the parks. Drug dealers and prostitutes worked any corner they felt like. Homeless people slept in doorways and vestibules, wrapped in blankets and despair. The garbage never got picked up. No one who was sane wanted to live there. Just crazies like us. We hung out at Max’s, CBGB and the Mudd Club. Also an after-hours dance club up in Spanish Harlem that she dared me to take her to one night. She was always daring me to be as fearless as she was. Dropping acid that first night at Antioch? A definite dare. Putting on a parachute and jumping out of a plane together somewhere over an airfield near Chester, Connecticut? Another definite dare. She could be a real stinker that way. That’s what I used to call her. Stinker.
She dared me to get started on my novel, too. Did I write it to prove to her that I could? That would be overstating it. I had plenty of other people to prove it to. My father, my mother, myself. But Merilee wasn’t wrong. It was Reggie who gave me the push. Trouble was that absolutely nothing about my faltering attempts to write it was nearly as exciting as she was. Reggie was the most intensely alive person I’d ever met, a 105-pound whirlwind of spontaneity. Sparks flew off her. Her poems were just like she was—bursting with raw, unfiltered emotion and energy. Often, she’d dash them off longhand in a single burst of creativity. And then she’d go raring off on another adventure.
Reggie was always on the move. If she wasn’t a poet-in-residence for a semester here or a guest lecturer there then she was busy trying to save someone or something somewhere. The Irrawaddy river dolphins in Laos. The elephants in Thailand. The mahogany trees in the Brazilian rain forest. If women were fighting for their rights in Moscow or Glasgow or Maputo, she’d be there. If Native Americans were getting kicked off their ancestral lands in Wyoming by a giant oil company she’d be there. She was my very own pint-sized Joan Baez.
And that became a problem for me. When she was around, my life was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. She turned everything so completely upside down that I couldn’t write. When she was gone my life was so painfully empty that I couldn’t write. The operative words here: I couldn’t write. After months of tormenting myself, I realized that I could either be with Reggie or I could write my novel.
I chose the novel.
Stopped seeing her. Stopped returning her calls. Stopped answering the door when she buzzed my apartment. I even stopped going to the places where I might run into her.
I did the right thing. My novel proved to be an even greater critical and financial success than I imagined was possible as I lay alone night after night for three long years, staring at the cracks in my bedroom ceiling. I also did the wrong thing. I broke off a relationship with a rare and special woman who was the love of my life. Until I met Merilee, that is. And I seem to have messed up that one, too. Possibly there’s a pattern there. Possibly there’s no possibly about it.
Reggie and I never saw each other again. Or spoke, although she did leave me a phone message after the novel came out, thanking me for the dedication and telling me she’d liked the book. Actually, what she said was, “Not bad, asshole.”
I got off the New York State Thruway at New Paltz, where there’s a SUNY campus and a quaint little village of narrow streets crammed with coffeehouses and delis. New Paltz had been a counterculture stronghold back in my own college days. And it hadn’t changed a bit, I discovered as I eased the Jag through town. The sidewalks still swarmed with scruffy, longhaired students wearing peacoats, flannel shirts and ripped, faded jeans. The morning air was richly scented with patchouli and pot. Thanks to the immensely popular Seattle grunge bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam and their throwback look, it was as if the revolution were still happening.
Here’s something that hadn’t occurred to me back in 1969: that Neil Young would someday come to rival Ralph Lauren as an American fashion icon.
On the outskirts of town I took the right-hand fork and crossed a bridge that went over a rushing river. Then the road narrowed and there seemed to be nothing but apple orchards and dairy farms. Five miles outside of town I spotted a wooden sign for the Root Chakra Institute, turned off onto a dirt road that twisted its way deep into the woods, and there it was.
It was not cozy or welcoming. It was a circa-1920s stone edifice that resembled a state reformatory where bad little boys and girls got sent to learn the errors of their ways. The Silver Fox’s assistant ran a check on the place for me and reported that it had, in fact, been a Jesuit seminary before Reggie bought it and turned it into a spiritual retreat and learning center that offered an array of workshops during the summer months. He didn’t know what went on there in December. Standing there, I had a pretty good idea what. Nothing. The parking lot was deserted except for one VW. It was so quiet that my citified ears buzzed.
The main entrance hall was exactly what you’d expect from a Jesuit seminary. Austere. In the administrative office a young woman informed me that Reggie was in the meditation solarium, which I’d find at the end of the hiking trail that was marked with blue arrows. She didn’t tell me that it was a steep, two-mile climb from the main building. That part Lulu and I had to figure out for ourselves.
The meditation solarium was a two-story, octagonal-shaped hilltop aerie. The first floor was constructed of stone and rough timbers. The second floor was a steel-trussed glass dome. The entryway served as a mudroom. A down jacket hung from one of the hooks on the wall. A pair of small, well-worn hiking boots was parked on the floor beneath it. There was a furnace room, judging by the quiet roar coming from behind a door marked do not enter. A cast-iron spiral staircase led up to the dome.
I called out Reggie’s name. She didn’t answer. No one did.
I looked down at Lulu. Lulu was looking up at me.
I took off my coat and boots. We climbed the spiral staircase and reached a closed door.
I called out Reggie’s name. She didn’t answer. No one did.
The door wasn’t locked. I opened it. It was quite warm inside the meditation solarium. Also quite breathtaking. Thanks to that glass dome, it enjoyed unobstructed panoramic views of the slate gray Hudson River and the bare, rolling hills miles beyond it.
Reggie Aintree was seated in lotus position on a prayer rug with her eyes closed. She was naked. Her body looked exactly the way I remembered—trim, taut and lovely. Her smooth flesh glowed. The only thing different about her was the long, shiny black hair that draped her thin, aristocratic face. It now had three streaks of white, not one.
Lulu moseyed over and mouth-breathed on her.
Reggie immediately opened her huge blue eyes. Lulu’s breath has that effect on most people. She squinted at me same as
she used to, as if she were regarding me from a vast distance. The squint may have been the same but her eyes were not. I used to see mischievous gaiety in those eyes. Utter fearlessness. Now I saw disillusionment and despair.
“Stewie, is that really you?” she asked me after a long moment, her voice sounding rusty and thin.
“In living black-and-white.”
“Forgive me, I’ve been in silent meditation for . . . It’s been five days, I think. Maybe six. I’ve lost track. I was very close to Mom again. I could feel her aura.” She smiled at me faintly. “It’s been ages and ages. It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too, Stinker. How have you been?”
“Okay, I guess. And you? Still wandering helplessly, day by day?”
“And the nights, too. Don’t forget the nights,” I said, gazing at her. The Reggie that I’d known had been a study in perpetual motion. This Reggie exuded a deep stillness. And the closer I studied her face the more I noticed that time had, in fact, etched it with creases and lines. “Tell me, how is it possible that you haven’t gained a single ounce in all of these years?”
“It was a snap. I picked up a parasite in Mumbai and had uncontrollable diarrhea for a month. I still have to watch what I eat or it’ll go right through me.” Reggie turned and found herself nose to nose with Lulu, who was studying her with keen interest. “So this is the famous Lulu, also known as Her Royal Earness, who loves chilled anchovies and once had her very own water bowl at Elaine’s.”
“How do you know all of that? Don’t tell me you read Liz Smith.”
“Of course I do. Besides, I always wonder how you’re doing. You were my first true love.” Reggie looked me up and down, arching an eyebrow. “One of us is overdressed for the meditation solarium.”
“It is rather tropical in here, now that you mention it.” I took off the jacket of my barley-colored tweed suit and hung it from a hook by the door.
“Stewie, why are you wearing cufflinks that say ssh?”
The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes Page 4