by Joan Silber
My mother was glad to have a steady job and she was very loyal to the hotel where she worked. People were, in those days. She was the head bookkeeper. “Ask Millie in the office” was such an all-purpose solution that Betsy, one of the hotel’s owners, gave my mom a pillow with this embroidered on it, as a tribute. And my mother loved that pillow. When I visited her at work, I was fed treats from the hotel kitchen—glistening hamburgers, hot caramel sundaes—but was not allowed to swim in the pool. Luís, the desk manager, played dominoes with me and let me show him my baseball cards.
When I was in ninth grade, my mother said, “Will you listen for a second? Stop eating and listen. I might get fired.” A sizable wad of cash was missing from the till. Betsy said she’d always trusted my mother in spite of her having an unsavory family situation. Everyone knew about my father. Betsy suggested that the thief, whoever it was, would do well to just put the money back before the police were alerted. They questioned Luís too. “They think we’re up to funny business together,” my mother said. “It’s ridiculous but I’m not laughing.”
“Luís is an old guy!” I said.
My mother, who was not that old for a mother, was weepy instead of loud and indignant. I did wonder if my father had managed to sneak into the hotel office without her knowing. Maybe her agony was in thinking this too. At the end of the week they left her alone but they fired Luís.
“Is he going to jail?” I said.
“Luís didn’t do anything!” she said. “You know Luís!”
Mr. Elegant Old Coot, Mr. Silver Fox, with his mustache and his deep, deep voice. He’d worked at that goddamn hotel longer than my mother.
“And nobody cares,” my mother said. “The union doesn’t care.”
The rank and stinking wrongness of it made me want to push the entire hotel into the sea. At the time, I saw the corruptions of the world as things to be trashed and slashed and ridiculed, I saw them from what might be called a criminal angle. Later I had other theories. I got my friend Dick, who was old enough to drive a car, to take me past the hotel at midnight, and we lit cherry bombs (what thrills of utter panic) and threw them—fast, fast—toward the empty lawn, where they landed in the bushes and exploded with great cracking booms, just as we peeled out of there. We could hear people shouting from the veranda above.
From the traffic light down the road, we looked back and saw flames in the bushes, which some poor sucker in a hotel uniform was going to have to put out. Dick, a perfectly nice guy, was slamming his hand on the steering wheel in savage glee. I whooped too, I did.
It scared the hell out of the guests—we knew this right away and heard for sure later. Let them leave, yes. Let this be the hotel’s worst October ever. The hotel told everyone it was pre-Halloween mischief, local kids gone wild. We lived in West Palm and weren’t even that local. My mother thought it was Luís’s kids, and maybe lots of people did.
A week later we all found out that the owners’ sleazy son was the one who’d made off with the missing money. And he was in some foreign country where no one could get to him. Luís was rehired, with apologies. But without his missing week’s pay. “They can never make it up to him,” my mother said. “Look at him. Look what they did to him.”
She was talking also about herself, the end to her cozy infatuation with her daily toil. She came home tired and sour. I was out of the house as much as I could be, pursuing my new hobbies. The elation of the cherry bomb attack was my gateway drug to further excitements of vandalism. We dumped human turds on somebody’s lovely private beach, we broke into my junior high and spray-painted Fuck Shit Cum all over the auditorium. It was pretty spectacular. Dick and I took a vow of silence, which we actually kept, and that was probably the only reason we weren’t caught.
If you’re testing your nerve, you need to keep going further. The next year, Dick’s friend Alan showed us how to break into and hot-wire a big fat white Pontiac parked outside the movie theater and we took it for a proverbial joy-ride, blasting the radio down the highway to Boca Raton and back. What I felt on that ride was a soaring belief, a white light of certainty, that we were really awake and most people were slaves and were asleep.
We did brag about that one. I was only fifteen, younger than the others, and I didn’t have girls to impress, but none of us kept our mouths shut. Which brought girls to me, in fact. Nicolette from my American History class started to hang around after the bell. She was okay, a bratty, complicated girl with a great rear end. Her friend Susan liked me too.
Once I was fooling around with girls, I had enough adventures at night to draw me away from mayhem with Dick and Alan. Somewhat. At the end of the summer the three of us set a magnificent bonfire on the beach and it took out a piece of somebody’s wharf. Well, that was fun to watch. I continued to do surprisingly well in school, much to my mother’s relief. This was partly because school was contemptibly easy, and partly because I still liked (as I always had) the privacy of reading. My mother said, “If you just remember you’re not the idiot you pretend to be, you’ll be fine. More than fine.” She said this fondly, patting my shoulder. She even laughed when I made an idiot face and pretended to drool. This may have been around the time she started having an affair with Luís, which made her quite happy for a while.
Luís was never going to divorce his wife. My mother (who got more confidential about the whole thing as time went on) was sure this was because he was Catholic, though it was clear to me he had plenty of other reasons. We were Jewish. (Even my father was.) They never sent me to Hebrew school or bothered with much of it, but now my mother proudly invoked Jewish tolerance of divorce. “What does the Pope know about marriage?” she said. “And birth control! Don’t get me started.”
What if you really thought there was a God (I didn’t) and you thought His rules were wrong? My mother said you could join another religion. “Let’s convert Luís to Muhammadism, and then he can have a lot of wives,” I said.
“Very funny,” my mother said. “Use your brain for something useful.”
Her thing with Luís went on for years. I went off to college (to Minnesota, where the winters were too cold and I had a scholarship) and I came home on vacations to find my mother all in knots about some new insult or frustration in her underground romance. My friends said, “At least she’s getting some,” which was a crude version of what I sort of thought. I did know, as well then as ever, what splendor my mother found in whatever she had with Luís, but I was too young to see why it would make her put up with all the other crap.
In college I myself had a lot of hot and fleeting romances. We enjoyed our drugs, in those days, and the mix of marijuana and sex was considered a personal revelation, a sacred message we each happened to decode. And I could never keep from talking about whether the mind was all chemicals and what that proved, conversely, about matter’s connection to spirit. I liked those airy arguments. In my head they were linked to the overwhelming evidence that the mundane world around me ran on hypocritical horseshit. Everything was in collusion to hide the truth, and my friend Dick from high school was drafted and sent to Da Nang on the word of government liars. I showed the kids from SDS how to throw a burning effigy of President Nixon on to the college lawn so that it torched some famous oak tree, which was kind of great to see. I engineered a small exploding rocket in front of the ROTC the next year, but I stopped there.
I never got into enough public trouble to risk my scholarship. I had to be careful. And by the time I graduated, I’d found my own sources for buying dope in quantity and was supplying a good part of the campus, at a very fair price.
I liked my day as a local big shot, but I knew from the years with my father the dangers of overestimating your own luck. My ambition in life was to go far but stay safe. Once I was out of school, I moved around, to Chicago and then to northern California, trying to get a handle on what I could do and not do. In San Francisco I had a girlfriend who was getting her master’s in art history and working as a stripper. What a strange
and fabulous creature she was. While she slept beside me, after her night of professional display and private love, I rose from bed each morning, in a great act of will, and went to my steady gig at the state unemployment benefits office. They had me (what a joke) interviewing people about their job searches and approving their continuing payments. I was very lenient.
That summer, my mother made one too many demands on Luís and he decided at long last, with much apology and probably genuine sorrow, to put an end to their romance, right at the time Sandie, my stripper girlfriend, ran off with the bass player in the club band. My mother and I had odd, dry, sad little conversations about how things would get better eventually. We were both ripped to shreds. My mother took refuge in Miller Lite and TV and weekly bridge games. I went to Zen meditation groups and Sufi concerts and Sikh Dharma talks. There was a lot of that around and some of it helped me, with its elaborated reiterations that there was more to care about than any Sandie.
One night I was sitting on the floor in the basement of a bookstore, watching Sufi dervishes twirl around and around, their white robes flaring like sails, their arms outstretched. They were mostly just plain old Americans like me, but they wore high brownish caps someone told me were tombs for the ego, and they pivoted on soft boots, circling in place, while the music was plucked and blown and beaten by musicians. All of this was designed to take them on an inner journey from which they emerged no longer caring about petty crap. I knew that much, which was not a lot. I sank into it enough to say afterward, “Hey! Amazing!” to the guy next to me, who was going out for a beer with some other people, and that was how I met Adinah.
There were maybe ten of us, filing into a smoky bar, and we got reshuffled so that this small-faced woman with fuzzy tendrils of pale hair was looking up at me. “I’m still dazed from watching those guys,” I said.
“Is this your first time?” she said. Probably this wasn’t the pickup line it sounded like.
“I plan to come back,” I said.
But it turned out her allegiance was to another Sufi group that had music but none of this whirling. “If you’re repeating God’s name inside, you don’t need to have this performance,” she said.
“Don’t be a bigot,” one of the women said. “I hate it when you get like that, Adinah. You’re so sectarian.”
“They have to focus when they twirl,” some guy said. “If they have worldly thoughts while they’re doing it, they get dizzy and collapse.”
“Adinah just likes her own fucking group,” another woman said.
“This is like the Middle Ages!” I said. “I’m in the middle of warring religious factions.”
I said this out of feeling uncomfortable, but to my surprise Adinah thought it was funny. “We are such assholes,” she said cheerfully.
I had ordered a big pile of gooey nachos for the table, and she turned out to be one of those skinny girls who ate very slowly and neatly. She worked, she said, as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant. “I bet they’re not big tippers, those veges,” I said.
“You guessed right,” she said. She didn’t look like someone who could have worked in a bar for real cash. Too skittish and big-eyed.
“What’s your favorite vegetable?” somebody at the table asked.
Everybody nominated a favorite sexy shape—the women picked giant zucchini, the guys went fruitarian and chose melons, with pantomimes to suggest the breastiness of them. Adinah just laughed, with her hand over her mouth.
This same shyness kept her from going home with me at the end of the night, although I thought she liked me. I gave her and about five other people a squished ride home in my old VW Beetle and I made sure to drop her off last. “To be continued,” she said, looking straight at me when I took her hand, but she got herself out of the car fast. I could see she was someone I had to go slow with.
So how could I be with someone like her after being with Sandie? I had no trouble, even in the early stages, intuiting the intensity of Adinah, the nuclear heat under the wispy flutter. She was quiet but she was never really mild. The soft pitch of her voice had the cadence of a strong will. And there was a fearless streak, as yet just a streak. Of the two of us, I was the more moderate, the more deliberating.
I went with her to classes given by her own particular Sufi group—their founder was from India, not Turkey—and I didn’t just do this in hopes of getting laid. I had other hopes too, of getting out of myself, of slipping into something larger than where I’d always lived. It was harder than I’d thought. There I was, apologizing to God for my separation from Him, when I didn’t exactly believe in God. But I had glimpses of another realm I might rise to later, if I could get more adept. It was interesting. I was very interested in the progress of my fate.
At the Sufi classes we moved our heads, swaying them to the right and then nodding down, saying no to petty bullshit and yes to God, over and over, while someone played an amazing giant lute called a tamboura and sang chants. He was still called Allah in the chants, and why not? We breathed in and out, we opened our hearts to God’s presence. I drove Adinah home across the Bay after the classes, and she’d sit talking to me in the car before she went in.
By the time Adinah and I became lovers, we had, in some way, beaten each other down. I had shaken off some of my boy-bluster, and she had grown more pliant, more hopeful. She muttered a prayer before she got into bed with me! I didn’t know what it was (she made it up), and it spooked me before my body decided, on its own, to be sublimely flattered. How naked she was, all of a sudden, turning to me, how familiarly female. I was sure I could carry us where we wanted to go. She muttered my name, nothing new in that, but it was a new and ardent form of Adinah.
She hadn’t had more than four lovers before me, but she knew herself better than some women do. She had great freedom in her, great ease, and then later, when we woke from our shared sleep and I watched her dress, putting on her dainty cotton underwear, a certain shyness came back and she was gawky as a chicken. Look at her, I thought. I could not have been more susceptible.
It was only the week before we first slept together that I’d heard she was from a family of Orthodox Jews. All her schooling had been in Jewish girls’ schools until college—and then she’d gone to Berkeley, of all places. Berserkly, as we liked to call it. She hadn’t been home to New York in three years. Her parents’ phone calls were still full of anger and pleading. “You’re all mixed up,” they said, sometimes with tears.
“They won’t give up,” she said. “They can’t.”
No, they didn’t know she went to any Sufi group. They already thought she was wild and promiscuous (ha) and addled with drugs. The Sufi group we followed was no longer attached to Islam anyway and proclaimed itself universal and tolerant. This explanation, Adinah said, would have gone nowhere with her parents. They would have shrieked to hear it. I wasn’t used to parents like that—I thought they were part of a world that had faded long since and was surprised they were so powerful to Adinah.
I told my own mother about Adinah and my mother said, “So she’s on her own now. They won’t make it easy.” My mother knew more about it than I did. After Adinah had sort of moved in with me, my mother liked to chat with her. Whether California had better weather than Florida, what Adinah made us for dinner. “Your mother has a nice personality,” Adinah said.
My own philosophical conflict with Adinah had to do with her being a vegetarian. She said what I ate was my own business, but the smell of meat made her nauseous. I didn’t really mind eating eggplant parmigiana or even soybean loaf for dinner, but I was naturally wary of being pussy-whipped. So we worked out some elaborate treaty, whereby I could store cooked meat (like bologna or liverwurst) in one corner of the fridge if I didn’t eat it in front of her. Like most compromises, this made neither of us happy, but we bragged of it so much to friends we began to believe we were peacemakers in love. Which was not untrue.
Adinah had been sharing a cottage in Berkeley with a swarm of people, so she didn�
��t have tons of belongings when she moved in with me. All the same, after the first blast of mutual joy, we were kind of crowded in my small space, never out of each other’s sight. So I got together some bucks left over from a minor marijuana deal Sandie had helped me with the year before, and I ponied it up for realtor’s fees and security, and I moved Adinah and me into a bigger apartment, on a hilly block in Noe Valley. The rent wasn’t a bargain, but I did have a salary.
I loved that apartment. It had a big bay window in the living room and great old woodwork and rooms full of nooks and crannies, very San Francisco. Adinah was touched that I’d done this for both of us, and, of course, I was touched too. I rented a sander and got the floors scraped to the nub, and then we practically asphyxiated ourselves swabbing polyurethane over them. I was the director of all of this, and she was my household. “I hate this job,” she said, happily. She wanted to name the apartment, the way people name a boat or sometimes a car, but I thought that was going too far.
Nonetheless she named it. We lived in “Heaven’s Door,” after the Dylan tune, knock, knock, knockin’ on. I pointed out that in the song the guy was dying, but she didn’t care. “It’s about the death of the lesser self,” she said. Well, I liked the song. “Want to go back to the Door?” she’d ask, when we’d been out at a party long enough. Even I started saying, “The Door is so big it keeps eating my socks.”
We had a mini-view of the eastern sky out the kitchen window, and we were always congratulating ourselves on this peek of cloudy white over the neighboring roofs. One unusually clear night we spotted the sliver of the new moon, and Adinah said, “Oh, there are prayers for that.” She meant Jewish prayers. For the moon? I’d never heard of such a thing. So were the Orthodox into astrology too? “No,” she said. “And it sounds better than it was.” I could hardly imagine the world she came from, with its rituals daily, weekly, monthly. “I like this moon better,” she said. “Our moon.”