Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  Dear Gary,

  Thanks for the card and for mentioning histories we have shared and still being friends. I might have been mad even after all these years, yet I am not at that place any more. When I think back on you I see not only the despicable jerk you were, but also the good times we had together. Perspective will do that to you.

  It looks (i.e. the Western Wall) like you are travelling. I have been too, but not in space so much as spirit. I see how human relationships are dwarfed. The true thing is our relationship with God. That is the one tie that lasts forever, so that is what I’m trying to get a handle on.

  As far as the mundane goes: I am now currently single, but I am living with my cat and some great people in a group house where we all work together and support each other. Bird life, ecology, and peace are some of the causes I am still espousing. How about you?

  Sincerely,

  Sharon

  P.S. Next time could you please type?

  I heard excited voices outside my door. People were cranking the stereo up. So I folded my letter and stuffed it in an envelope and addressed it. Then I realized I had no stamps. I knew where Kathryn kept the house roll, but somehow I couldn’t leave my room. I sat and I sat. I took my citronella candle and my punk coil that I kept there and I lit them up, since my screens were ripped and I had mosquitoes. I watched the punk slowly burn. The end turned white. Millimeter by millimeter the coil was smoldering and crumbling. The party was growing louder outside, yet still I stayed. I was starting to get that weirdly satisfying mellow melancholy feeling of being forgotten. Like there I was, citronella Cinderella, having worked and slaved behind the scenes to get stuff ready, and then I had to stay home from the ball. Except actually I hadn’t done anything for the party except chop vegetables. Kathryn was the one who’d really put in the effort.

  For around forty-five minutes I hid out, until Will came to find me.

  Knock, knock, knock. “Sharon?”

  “What?”

  “Sharon?”

  “What?”

  He opened my door and stuck his head in. “Aren’t you coming out?” he asked. He wore these little wire-rimmed aviator glasses. His face looked so gentle and mild yet surprised. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just don’t feel like I’m in such a partying mood.”

  “How come?”

  I shrugged.

  “Oh, honey,” said Will, and he hugged me.

  His hug squeezed a few tears from my eyes.

  “Are you feeling left out?”

  I nodded and wiped my face with my hand. Then I smiled at him. “But I don’t know why,” I said.

  So he took my hand and we moved on out into the huge mob of people that were filling the house. And he got me a couple of drinks and stood next to me until I was okay on my own.

  Outside in the yard by the food, which was arrayed on a camp table, Rich was standing with Kathryn, and she was beaming. She was wearing a really small turquoise dress, and pumps on her feet without stockings. Rich had on a new aloha shirt, and he had a whole bunch of leis piled on his neck. His beard was trimmed and his hair cut. This patina of mellow handsomeness was covering Rich, which I guess is what monogamy and a degree at long last will bring. All around Rich and Kathryn was the zoology department drinking beer, and Kathryn’s Greenpeace friends, and buddies from Kathryn’s canoeing club. But I didn’t see Brian at all. So I just went out and hugged Rich and hugged Kathryn and then bent over the casserole dish and loosened up a couple of enchiladas. As I straightened up I nearly bumped heads with Imo.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “Sharon!” She bestowed a smile. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I said loudly above the roar of the crowd.

  Her tan was lighter than I remembered. I guess she’d been ashore more. She still had the short hair, and those sharp black eyes, but she was looking at me kindly.

  All my blood rushed to my head. I smiled at her like crazy. I was backing away, and she was asking, “What have you been up to? How have you been?”

  I just kept backing up with my plate wobbling in one hand and my beer in the other. We ended up standing inside, practically in the kitchen, with me telling her all about my life in the monastery, and various jobs like Crack Seed World. The great gig I had now at Shirokiya.

  She knit her brow and leaned in toward me so she could hear. “You’ve done a lot of different kinds of things.” She spoke so politely, like we had just met for the first time.

  “Well, if it’s one thing I’ve learned,” I said, “it’s that everything you do is connected. It’s like this whole chain or circle—but that’s how you learn, right?”

  Imo said, “I thought the plan was for you to go back to school.”

  “Hey, school is just one form of education,” I said.

  “A useful one.”

  I looked through the louver window toward Rich, who was going to be starting his postdoc in the fall. His stack of leis was higher now that more guests had arrived. He was walking around chin deep in carnations, orchids of all colors. Wherever he went he left a scent of ginger flowers and gardenias. “Useful for what?” I asked.

  Imo smiled.

  “It’s not like I don’t respect Rich for all the work he did, but the kind of education I want to do is more on the inside. I mean, you can study to be a doctor or an accountant or even maybe some kinds of scientist, but I feel like what you’re studying can only be the surface. It’s like the tip of the iceberg! And the actual delving you need to do, and diving down below the surface—how can some degree give you that?”

  “Well,” Imo said, “isn’t the idea to acquire tools? And to learn techniques? The point is to avoid reinventing the wheel.”

  “But you know, spiritwise every wheel is different,” I retorted. My head was buzzing a little bit from drinking after being relatively abstemious for a long while. “And, see, being identical to some standard wheel—is that all you get from degrees?”

  Brian had walked in. He was way off in the far corner of the living room, but I sensed him all the way over there. My heart was racing. I wanted to turn and run, but somehow now that I’d started talking I couldn’t stop. I kept going, louder, faster. The words were pumping. “What about truth?” I brandished my fork at Imo. “And I don’t mean window dressing—or just some academic game universities put on. I mean TRUTH. The whole enchilada. What about enlightenment? What about transcendence? What do you major in for that?”

  Imo cocked her head.

  “Mmm,” she said. You could actually hear her voice crisping up, like the Imo of old—delicate and crunchy like colonialist toast.

  Then all of a sudden she said one of the single most important things that up to that time anyone had ever said to me in my whole life. “Religion, of course,” said Imo. “You would major in religion for that.”

  12

  Magnetic Currencies

  IN my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you: I go to prepare a place for you.”

  Jesus lifted his bare arms toward us there in Galilee. He was telling us not to be afraid, even though he knew he was going to die. All of a sudden I couldn’t take notes anymore. I’d heard Professor Flanagan was good, but now I knew. Because he stood up there in his white robe with his long hair and no notes, and he spoke to us, and his voice was so tender, and the words so pure. Listening to him you forgot this was a class at all, and you couldn’t see the books and the loose leafs and the rows of student desks. You couldn’t think about lunch or getting to your job, or any of that. There was Professor Flanagan dressed in a simple white robe, and he made it true, what he said. “Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.”

  Since I worked, I could only take one class each semester, but Intro Religion was a doozy. You had to enter a lottery just to get in, because the course was so popular. And that wasn’t just because instead of a final exam or research paper you submitted a journal of a personal religious investigation
. It was because of the prof himself. Not for nothing did Flanagan have a joint appointment in the drama department. In Intro Religion, Professor Flanagan came to each class dressed up in the style of the whatever prophet he was teaching, and actually took on that figure’s voice and personality. So he gave all his lectures in the first person. He was Buddha, and Moses, and Jesus, and Mohammad—except my year was the last time he did Mohammad, because a sophomore who was an Omani prince started offering the Muslim Students’ Association a large reward for bumping off Flanagan for blaspheming the Prophet.

  “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you,” Flanagan said. “Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more; but you will see me. And because I live, you shall live also.”

  I sat in the second row of the class. I was chewing on the top of my ballpoint, but I didn’t even know. I only saw later that the plastic was all chewed up. That was Flanagan’s charisma. It was as if he were inventing this stuff on the spot. It was as if he were standing there before you, coining the golden rule. And suddenly coming up with all the inspirational sayings, so that you listened to the Sermon on the Mount, and you felt like you were hearing it for the first time. And actually, in my case, I was.

  When he ended, he stood in silence. For a long moment nobody breathed. Then applause rang out through the whole room. I stood on my feet, and the whole class was standing with me.

  When we all drifted out into the sunshine we blinked our eyes. It was like coming out from a great movie. I pretty much floated to work. At Shirokiya I saw the customers come and go, and it was as if I was looking at them through glass—like they were great silent fish in an aquarium, and when they spoke the words escaped their mouths like bubbles. Until all of a sudden one big guy in a hurry cornered me. He demanded the price on a black Samsonite suitcase, and I was so shocked to be accosted like that I nearly turned my back on him before I remembered I was actually working in the luggage department.

  This was the most studious period of my life. This was the time I became almost scholastic, because I was so infatuated with the idea of academic rigor. My housemates saw the difference in me now that I was back in school. I would hole up in my room and read the Koran. I would sit in the living room in our bowl-shaped papa-san chair and highlight Exodus in my Holy Bible—the King James edition. I copied quotes into my black composition book. Sometimes I quoted my quotes aloud—just to meditate on them. For example, I would be sitting in the papa-san cross-legged and I would say “I have told you, O man, what is good. Only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.” And I would chant the verse, and I would rearrange it and shuffle it around—but with respect—just the way you would turn a jewel in the light. “I have told you, human, what is good. Only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk wholly with thy God. I have told you, woman, what is good….”

  Then Rich would walk by and say in a snide voice, “Om shanti shanti.”

  He always made fun of me. He kept joking I was trying to get religion because I wasn’t getting anything else. He was so crude. One day I turned on him. I said, “Rich, it seems like you’re really threatened by my growth.”

  Rich guffawed, “Yeah, I am. I’m afraid of what you’re growing into.”

  “Very funny.” I looked at his postgraduate beer belly. “Why don’t you worry about how you’re growing?”

  The topic actually came up at our house meeting. Not Rich’s weight, but my studies. We were all sitting around the table eating popcorn out of a punch bowl, and I said, “It’s time for new business, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Tom.

  “Well, under new business I’d like to say it really bothers me that people object to me studying in the living room.” “That’s not new business,” said Kathryn.

  “What is it then?”

  “That’s an area of concern,” she said.

  “Okay, fine. Whatever you want to call it. When people walk by and make comments while I’m reading, then I don’t feel like I’m welcome in the house.”

  “I never made a single comment about your reading,” said Tom.

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” I told him. “Om shanti shanti,” I said. “That was harassment.”

  “It was a little joke,” Rich said, getting on the defensive.

  “To me, it wasn’t a joke, okay? And I’m tired of being harassed just for studying religious texts.”

  “What, now you’re getting into martyrdom?”

  “You see what I mean,” I appealed to everybody.

  “I was being facetious. Give me a break.”

  “No, you give me a break,” I snapped. “I never bothered you.”

  Rich glared at me. “How about demanding we all say grace before dinner?”

  “Demanding? It was a suggestion. It was an idea. I said, I am floating this idea out to you that maybe we should consider discussing just possibly allowing some meaningful words to leave our mouths before we stuff our forks into them!”

  “And we voted it down,” Tom said.

  “Three times!” Rich said. “Sharon, we all care about you … am I right?” he asked the others.

  “We love you,” Will said. “It’s just that it seems at times …”

  Rich jumped in. “Like we’re living with this person who is slowly turning into some kind of humorless …”

  Kathryn finished for him. “Fanatic.”

  “Fanatic? You guys!” I spread my hands. My fingers were shiny with popcorn butter. “How could you think that about me?”

  “Sometimes I’m scared for you,” Kathryn said.

  “You are so hostile to me,” I said.

  “Stop!” said Will.

  No one spoke for a minute.

  “I guess we’ll work harder on sensing people’s boundaries,” Will said.

  “Amen,” said Rich.

  I shot him a glance.

  He was staring down at the table with a poker face.

  I began withdrawing somewhat from my life in the house. I spent long hours in my room with Marlon and the letters I received from Gary. Yeah, who would have thought? Gary and I were writing to each other all the time. He was sitting there in Jerusalem and I was in Hawaii, and we were writing to each other. I used to read his letters over and over to myself because they were so mysterious. They were so sadly beautiful. I’d never realized Gary could write in such a poetic style. (Now he was sending all his letters typed.) “Sharon,” he wrote to me. “When I read your letter my hands trembled. All these years, and in the end, you, like me, are seeking God. I’ve traveled the whole world searching. Ten years I’ve traveled, and lost myself so many times on the way. Love, success, money, these were all mine. Yet all that time my heart was restless. Only now in Jerusalem I am coming to the beginning of myself. I am reading the ancient texts. I am living in the Old City of the angels and the prophets. I am finding the key.”

  It turned out that after traveling the Pacific with the German chick, Katrina, he had followed her back to Germany and lived with her for several years, after which she had unceremoniously dumped him for another guy. Gary had then taken off and wandered throughout Germany and Holland and worked for a while as a stringer for the Associated Press, during which time he visited Anne Frank’s house. While he was there in the hidden rooms where Anne had lived, he saw the table where she had eaten and the bed where she had slept, and he began sobbing. All of a sudden he’d realized something. He was a Jew. Of course, he had been Jewish all his life, but it had never hit him before. That he was a Jew like Anne. He was Jew enough to be killed for it. As soon as he realized he was Jewish, Gary took off for Jerusalem. He didn’t know the language, or anything, but he went straight from the airport to the Western Wall. There, two rabbis from the Torah Or Institute were waiting for him. They picked him right up and took him back to the institute to teach him Judaism, which was the key to himself that he had been missing all this time.

  Of course, it took a lot of letters back and forth for me to get the
whole picture. As I said, Gary had a very spiritual poetic way of writing. And yet it was the strangest thing corresponding with him. I understood so well what he had been dealing with in his wanderings. I knew exactly what it was like to have a heart that was restless. Reading his words was like reading my own. It was like meeting my own twin wanderer after years of separation. I thought: Could it be that in some karmic way, everything is coming around again? After all, he’d had no way of knowing I would still be in Hawaii when he’d written his postcard. As he explained, he’d only really written it for himself.

  “Dear Gary,” I wrote. “I believe in symmetries in the universe. Correspondences! I believe that people can fall into a certain pattern, even when that pattern is so complicated you cannot figure it out. Like you, I am into prophets. Like you, I am trying to reconnect. Here we are, on opposite sides of the world, yet magnetic currencies flow through us. We are both coming from the same place.”

  My letters to Gary were long. I used to write him page after page. It took me that long to express my thoughts. Plus, my handwriting was big. I wrote to him all about my house and about school and Shirokiya and my vision and rebirth. I’d mail off my latest thoughts and then I’d wait and wait. But it took over a week just for my letter to reach him, and then sometimes ten, twelve more days for his answers to come back. Day after day I’d open our rusty old mailbox that Kathryn had spray-painted white. No cigar. Oftentimes all I’d find would be our house bills, along with the green chameleon who used to hide there in the back.

  “Hi, little guy,” I said one day, poking my face into the mailbox.

  The chameleon looked at me calmly. He was about ten inches long, mostly tail, and he was bright green, like a leaf with the sun shining through it. He breathed in and out and spread his tiny little toes on the corrugated metal mailbox floor. He looked out at me. I looked in at him. We each contemplated the view.

  “Can you change color?” I asked him.