by E. J. Levy
Renee had expected the Center to be kooky and rundown, like the lavender-and-mustard-colored Victorian house that had doubled as a TM center and love commune off the campus of Texas A & M. But when she arrived after work that chilly December evening, she had found to her disappointment that the Center was drably genteel: a narrow gaunt brownstone wedged between identical brownstones, each with its own five-foot plot of cement fenced in by grillwork. The Center was distinguished only by an ornately painted “OM” that hung from a sign post and by the glass-enclosed announcement board nailed next to the front door listing class times and aphorisms: Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realize.
Renee had unlatched the gate and pressed the buzzer for admittance. A young dark-haired guy, dressed in a peach T-shirt and cotton drawstring pants, buzzed her in.
“It’s $48 to become a member and you get a discount on the classes,” said the skinny guy, who was busy entering names on a clipboard.
“If I make it a round $50 will you toss in enlightenment for free?”
“Sign here,” he said, blandly, not looking up from his list.
Gil was taking a yoga class that night, so Renee hung around the boutique fingering the small brass deities and thumbing through the pamphlets on enlightenment, hoping to ride home with him, maybe convince him to stop for something to eat.
When Gil came down the stairs half an hour later, Renee’s heart clenched. In those first few weeks after Gil started practicing yoga, every time Renee looked at him something caught in her throat. It was the way she used to feel when they drove together along the Gulf Coast of Texas and parked on a ridge above the dunes. She would hold Gil’s hand and look out at that broad expanse of water stretching to other continents and her heart would ride out to all those places she would never go, knowing they were out there waiting to be visited, but not by her.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Gil said, and kissed her.
“That makes two of us,” Renee said.
“Hang on a minute while I change and we can go grab some dinner.”
Outside on the street the air was cold as a slap. Renee hunched over, her head retracted into her collar, bent against the wind, while Gil walked erect, humming one of the chants she recognized from the Center, impervious to the cold. Renee stole glances at the windows they passed, stuffed with elves in red felt suits, plastic reindeer, miniature towns winking with miniature Christmas lights, mangers, enormous aluminum snowflakes. It seemed to her there was something particularly disheartening about shop windows trimmed with holiday decorations the day after a holiday. They gave away the lie. The epiphany promised by ribbons and tinsel was a ruse. The trimmings were still there and we remained unchanged. They had not transformed us.
As they sat together over a dinner of moro rice and dim sum at their favorite Cuban-Chinese restaurant, Gil told her about his plans to move to the ashram. He had not wanted to move to New York City, but when Renee decided to leave Texas, he’d left with her. Now, he said, he understood why. Why New York. Why Renee.
“Don’t you see,” he confided over the scattered plates. “I was meant to meet you. Otherwise, I never would have moved here … found the Center … yoga.” He took her hand across the table.
“I feel like a karmic rest stop,” Renee said.
All the way up in the yoga van, Renee thinks about how she will change her life, how she will propose she and Gil move back to Texas to the country he had never wanted to leave and had left only for her. All the way up on the van, she strategizes. She thinks of how she will propose they have a child, how she will tell him it is something that will last. But as soon as she sees him waiting on the lawn beside a white clapboard house, dressed in celibate yellow and smiling at her with abstracted fondness, she knows it is hopeless. That she has lost him.
“How was your trip?” he asks, kissing her on the cheek.
“I thought of you,” she says and notes a flicker of panic cross his face. “We passed a semi that said G.O.D. on the side in four-foot-high silver letters. What do you suppose its cargo was?”
Gil smiles and for a moment Renee catches sight of the cynical former man she loved inside the beatific new.
“Let me take your bag,” he says, hoisting the backpack on his shoulder.
“Gil,” she says, touching his arm.
“What?” He turns only his head.
“Are you happy? I mean, here?”
Gil stares at Renee for a moment then looks away, up the grassy hill to the main buildings, surveying the place as if it would provide an answer he didn’t have himself.
“As happy as anyone can be, I suppose,” he says.
“Just how happy is that, anyway?” Renee asks.
“That’s not really the point is it? Happiness.”
“What is the point?”
“‘It is neither our feelings nor our experiences that matter but the mute tenacity with which we confront them.’”
“Who said that? Augustine?”
“Godard,” says Gil. “C’mon. I’ll show you to your room.”
The room Gil brings her to is on the second floor of the ashram’s main house, a two-story white clapboard house at the base of a large sloping hill. Farther up the hill are two large red nineteenth-century guest hotels, reminders of the place’s former life as the Hay Wire Dude Ranch. Renee’s room is small and freshly painted; there is a wooden bed with heavy mismatched blankets folded across the foot. There is a rectangular mirror above a chest of drawers and on the wall beside the bed hangs a color illustration of the Indian saint revered by this sect, whose bald round head looks like that of an enormous cheerful infant. From her bedroom window, Renee can look out behind the house where the hillside continues to slope down for another mile past a tidy circular pond, a bramble of apple trees, a field gone yellow in the unseasonable late autumn heat, to a forest of aspen and birch. “Populus tremuloides,” Gil had told her when they were hiking that first summer together in the mountains of New Mexico. “Quaking aspen.” He loved to be able to give things names, to be able to say what was what. The first gift Gil ever gave Renee was a Field Guide to North American Birds. He’d said, “There are certain things you have to learn by heart.”
“Listen,” he’d said once, stopping on the sidewalk, one evening not long after they’d moved to New York. They were walking home up Broadway past Union Square. Renee squinted at the shadowed doorways and blank alleys pointed at them like rifle barrels from the surrounding buildings. Gil looked up at the empty sky. Somewhere Renee heard a scream, thin, shrill, faint.
“Did you hear it?” he asked.
“Someone screaming?”
“Night hawk,” he said.
“In the city?”
“They nest on rooftops and cliffs.”
She still wonders if he wasn’t mistaken, if the sound wasn’t a seagull or someone being mugged, which in his longing Gil mistook for something rare and loved and absent.
Dinner is served at five o’clock and held en plein air, under a striped tent on the front lawn of the ashram. A series of long tables of food stretches along one wall of the tent; the other side is crowded with wooden picnic tables. At least a hundred people have gathered to dine and the dinner line snakes across the hill. It looks like a country fair, ordinary, wholesome, except that a disturbing number of people are dressed in peach or crocus yellow, a color coordination that Renee cannot help but think of as vaguely creepy, cultish. If one is going to make a mess of things, she thinks, better to do it on one’s own, avoid the crowd.
As they wait together in line, people come up and press Renee’s arm and say she must be very proud of Gil. They wink at Gil and tell her, He’s a wonderful man. He’s great with a crowd. She knows that what they say is true, that Gil has a gift for putting people at their ease, blending wit with self-effacement. Jack-of-all-trades, he can change oil on a tractor, make cheese from raw milk, sew buttons, cut hair. Gil has raised his lack of ambition to the level of a calling. Despite his educatio
n, he remains heroically unprofessional. She loves this in him, and hates it.
As they pass under the tent, Renee notes that the driver is one of the food servers. He is in charge of doling out blueberries for dessert, one scoop per person the rule. When she reaches the driver, he holds Renee’s eyes for a moment, before he heaps her plate. She cannot tell if he means anything by it, the look, that extra scoop.
After getting their food, she and Gil walk over to a small square table to pick up silverware before leaving the tent. As Renee pulls a fork from a molded plastic tray of cutlery, a woman from the van eyes Renee’s plate, where blueberries roll around into the curried tofu and rice pilaf.
“It pays to have friends in low places,” the woman says with a wink.
“What was that about?” Gil asks.
“Who knows,” says Renee. They join a group on the hill.
Most of the ashram-goers have been bartenders, ex-junkies, most have experienced tragedy: There is the woman whose son died at prep school; the red-headed rock and roller who was a heroin addict. Renee wonders about Gil. What sorrows he has guarded that she never knew. She remembers a night last winter when he told her that he didn’t want to come back, that his highest aspiration in life was to die for good and stay dead. “I didn’t know you were so unhappy,” she had said. “I’m not,” he’d smiled.
When the driver comes to join them with his dinner tray, it is not a surprise.
He sits down, cross legged, in the grass next to Renee. There is a light stubble on his cheek, against his dark skin. She guesses he is Greek, maybe Spanish. When Gil asks him where he’s from, he tells them Brussels.
“Belgium,” the driver says, chewing, “has a two-to-one ratio of pigs to people.”
“Who knew?” Gil says.
As Gil eats, he asks the driver how he came here, how he got involved with yoga, and the driver shrugs. Says he doesn’t know. And Renee knows in that moment that he is in it for the women. He isn’t wearing peach or yellow like the others, meaning he hasn’t taken vows of celibacy. He is one of the hangers on, the irreligious who haunt religious places.
“Is this your first time?” the driver asks Renee. “At the ashram, I mean.” She says it is. He smiles and sets his fingertips gently on her thigh and offers to show her around.
“What a nice guy,” Gil says, after the driver leaves.
Renee wonders if Gil is being ironic, but she knows that he has given up on irony. He believes it is “spiritually suspect,” a phrase that sounds to Renee like a bad Buddhist spy movie.
After dinner, Gil goes to wash dishes and Renee goes to join the others who have gathered in the Krishna temple for satsang, an evening lecture and meditation. The small rodent-faced woman seated beside the harmonium in orange monks robes used to be an ad executive in Los Angeles and was called Louise Hickenbocker. Now she is Swami Gokulananda, named for a province in India where cattle are plentiful. She is in her early thirties but has skin as taut and radiant as a child’s. All the swamis look like children, Renee thinks; they smile and show their teeth eagerly, crinkling up their eyes in identical crescents like well-adjusted second graders. These are not the kids that pushed when lines for the playground formed at the door. They did not fight for the rights of girls and scrawny boys to use the swings as Renee had. Even in the second grade, she had felt obliged to fight, to stand up to the vague, encroaching threat she could only dimly apprehend.
Gokulananda leads the group in a song about St. Francis of Assisi, then in meditation, then they read from Mantras and Meditation of Swami Vishnu Ramananda. Ramananda is the head swami in these parts. Last month he tried unsuccessfully to leave his body on a mountaintop in India and ended up living in London. One of the meditations is about brahmacharya, celibacy. Swami Gokulananda reads it aloud to the room. Afterward, she leads them in an elliptical talk about sex. Gokulananda says they shouldn’t have it. “Sexual desire steals energy. Just like having a baby drains energy from the mother’s body.” Renee thinks about what the world would be like if everyone were so miserly about their bodily forces, so stingy with passion.
Renee has learned not to think about the baby she and Gil almost had. What she remembers instead is the hospital, the blue and white stripes of the curtains, the sharp-edged sunlight outside the window the morning Gil came to see her. They sat holding hands not speaking, looking out the window as if they expected to see something there other than the silver lamp posts sticking up in the parking lot like weeds.
Hers had been a sudden pregnancy, unexpected and unplanned. In the wake of the test results, Renee began to notice the women in shopping malls and the supermarket who pushed strollers and trailed toddlers from their hands. It seemed a remarkable act of courage to bring children into the world, to defy predictions of a nuclear holocaust, environmental apocalypse. Bringing a baby into the world, each of them dared the world not to let her child live. Sometimes, in the night, Gil would pass his hand over her rounding belly and she would wake to find him gazing at her like some new species of plant, amazed at the life before him. There was talk of marriage and baby names.
Renee began to neglect the obituaries in the local paper, to take long solitary walks at night and marvel at the deep purple of the sky and to feel once more—in what she thought might be merely an excess of hormones—a great thrilling hope, a joy solid as statistics, in the simple beauty of the world. She began to marvel at people in the street, that each one had come from some other one who had risked her life to give it life.
She felt the immensity of the spinning world beneath her, all its poignant possibility, and felt again the tremendous sense of promise she had known in her youth. Irrational, misplaced, the hope grew in her like the child she was carrying, and by the time Renee realized what was happening it was too late. Only later would she understand that her hope had been like her father’s erstwhile faith in the Party, like her mother’s belief in the man she’d married: fragile and fallible and misplaced.
After the lecture, they meditate. Renee breathes in and out and in and out until she is dark inside and still. She can feel the people around her, their breath, the torpor of their bodies. She can sense them in the dark behind her eyes. The cool blue emptiness of Gokulananda, like an ice field, remote and slowly shifting. Renee tries chanting OM in her mind, imagining the sound reverberating in the universe like a bass note. Gil has told her that if you find the proper pitch, you will be instantly enlightened.
She feels the vibration in her groin first. Then in her belly, then in her chest. A shivering heat moves up her torso, making her palms sweat. Then it ceases. The wave comes again, stronger. She feels the heat move up her body, as if it were traveling a corridor through the center of her, knotting then releasing, then knotting again, like an orgasm the length of her torso, as the heat rises from groin to belly to chest to throat out the top of her head in shudders. It ceases, only to begin again.
Later Gil will tell her that what she has experienced is kundalini energy rising, that it is a stage in enlightenment, one he has not yet achieved. “I thought it was a hot flash, early onset of menopause,” Renee says. “No such luck,” Gil says. “It’s God.” And Renee thinks that maybe it is and maybe it’s not, but either way it doesn’t matter. She has long ago learned that there are certain things you can put faith in and certain things you can’t. As a child, she had believed in magic, in witchcraft and incantations, she’d even believed she had supernatural powers and would fly if she let herself freefall from her parents’ roof. But like certain words that she had cultivated in her childhood because they could amaze her—plagioclase, comestible—faith was a thing forgotten in adulthood that left her with a faint disturbing sense of loss when she came across it now.
It seems to her now that the only thing that will always be there with her, for her, the only thing she can depend on, is the struggle, the fight, la luta.
Renee finds Gil sitting on the front stoop, studying his hands the way he does when he is worried. He wears a T-shir
t, sandals, sweats. His hunched body looks vulnerable and young, and she feels a terrible urge to ask him to come home with her. To come home. Marry me, she wants to say, but instead she takes a seat. Together they stare into the darkness, into the grainy indigo air.
“How can I follow someone who won’t be there to lead me?” he asks. Tomorrow Gil is to be initiated into his mantra, and he is angry because Swami Vishnu Ramananda is back on a mountaintop right now trying desperately to die; he may be dead by the time Gil takes him as guru.
“There will be others with you,” Renee says, knowing they will not be her.
“The blind leading the blind,” Gil says. He tells her that he feels abandoned to have come this far only to find that he may have to go on alone, that his guru is waiting for death in a cave in the mountains of India, listening to holy men read the epic Bhagavatam, twenty-four hours a day. “I just wish it could have been different,” he says.
Renee looks out at the shadowy trees below them. A goat bleats in the dark.
“Take a number,” Renee says.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I wish I were beautiful, that there wasn’t a hole in the sky over Antarctica. Everyone wishes something were different.”
That night, when she is sitting alone in her second-floor room reading by lamplight, she thinks of how she and Gil had talked of marriage once, just before they left Texas, when it seemed there were only two choices before them, splitting up or settling down. When she knew Gil loved her, it had seemed a simple thing to live without him, to leave him behind and move to this city by herself. “Being in love is just collaborating on a mutual fantasy,” she had told him then. “Sometimes one plus one can equal less than two.” Now she understands that it is always at the end, when things are coming unraveled between two people, that marriage is proposed. It’s always in the face of loss that people look for signs.