“Yes,” said Cat. “They both worked as trance channelers for entities on the other side to come through.”
We walked on for a moment, Cat excitedly animated at the prospect of my being exposed to a dimension of life that she had long ago accepted. But I wanted to double-check her feelings.
“Cat?” I asked. “Do you honestly believe there is an ‘other side’ and that disembodied spiritual entities can talk to us and teach us and stuff like that?”
Cat turned and looked at me in astonishment. “Do I believe it?” she asked.
I nodded.
“No,” she answered, shocking me into stopping dead in my tracks. “No. Not at all,” she reiterated. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”
I realized that, because this was Cat, I had just heard a powerful statement of faith. And she said it with such love. Any other suspicious question I might ask her from then on would be a reflection of my own inability to accept Cat’s fundamental value system. I would be judging or questioning the very depths of what made up her character and personality. I might fancy myself as a kind of adventurous human reporter, but I certainly wasn’t going to ridicule another human being’s belief system or “knowingness” as Cat apparently defined it.
“Well,” I said, “this Ambres seems like an interesting entity to get to know.” I felt like an imposter as I heard the word “entity” come out of my mouth.
“Oh, Shirley, when Anne Marie and Sturé and his wife come to the States we’ll give you a call. Too bad you have no reason to go to Stockholm. Don’t you need to buy a pair of skis or something?” We laughed as we continued to walk, segueing into a conversation about food-combining and the latest info on what dairy products do to the digestive system. Soon we embraced and said goodbye, promising to follow up on our newly initiated spiritual exploration.
I went immediately home, feeling a strong urge to call Gerry in London. I just needed to speak to him. In fact, I felt I needed to see him. I guess I wanted to hear him and touch him and experience him as my other real world. I didn’t feel much like seeing any other friends, and I had some time to myself before rehearsals for the new show began.
As I called him I was reminded of how conditioned I had been to checking out my feelings with the man I was involved with. Somehow my own feelings, my own questions, my own searching, my own new interests seemed partially inadequate and only half realized without including the man. I couldn’t talk to Gerry about what I was into, but it would help me to check out my own perceptions just to be with him. It was hard to admit that I needed to ratify my own identity in relation to the man in my life, but there it was.
I reached him at his office in London.
“Hello,” he said, not at all surprised to hear from me so soon after our Honolulu meeting.
“Gerry,” I said, sensing that he was rushed, “I know you’re busy, but I want to come to London to see you. I have a few weeks and I want to spend them with you.”
I could hear him hesitate on the other end of the Atlantic cable.
“Oh,” he said finally, “but I’m going to Stockholm.”
“In Sweden?” I said idiotically, stunned. I had just agreed with Cat it was too bad I didn’t have a reason for going there.
As I think about it today, I would have to say that this was the beginning of a series of events which, as they unfolded, gave me a definite sense of pattern. Of course one could say most anything in life is simply coincidental, but after awhile, when coincidence becomes multiple, a redefinition of “accidental” is necessary.
In any case Gerry went on about his trip to Stockholm.
“Yes,” he said, “I have a Socialist economic meeting and I’ll be there for a week.”
“Oh,” I said, “so why don’t I come to Stockholm? I love snow.”
He didn’t say anything. I heard him excuse someone from his office politely and shuffle some papers.
“Gerry?” I said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Hello.”
“Gerry. I need to talk to you. I need to be with you. I miss you. I mean, I really do. And I guess I need to know how you really feel.”
I felt I was acting like a school girl pursuing her hero. I waited for him to say something. Every moment seemed to have some horribly anxious meaning. Finally he said, “Yes. Yes, I miss you too.”
He was so uncomfortable, but I pressed on.
“So is it all right? Would it be convenient if I met you in Stockholm? I’ll make all my own arrangements.”
“What did you mean, you want to know how I really feel?”
He sounded frightened.
“What’s wrong, Gerry?”
“I’m upset.”
“I know. Why? Upset at what?”
“I’m upset at pleasure.”
“What pleasure? What do you mean?”
“I’m upset at the pleasure it gives me to know what I mean to you.”
“Why? Why would you be upset by that?”
“Because,” he said, “I can’t understand why I’m so important to you. And it makes me feel inadequate.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he was really saying.
“Do you want to see me, Gerry?” I asked.
“I’m longing to see you, but I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you. I hate that,” he said. “I hate feeling that I’ll disappoint you.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe the important thing is not to disappoint yourself. Can we talk?”
“Come to Stockholm in two days,” he said. “I’ll be at the Grand. You arrange accommodations somewhere else.” He hesitated a few more moments. Then he whispered, “Goodbye,” and hung up.
I sat there thinking about what it must feel like to feel inadequate to another person. It was a feeling I had never really experienced as far as I could remember. I had felt dependent on others, especially regarding the “man” syndrome, but the inadequacies I usually felt were to myself and that could be just as bad. The standards and goals I set for myself were sometimes impossible to live up to and made me too self-demanding. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint myself. I didn’t want to do what he had done.
But Gerry wasn’t the only man who had complained of feeling inadequate with me. I remembered several important relationships I had had which ultimately ended because the men simply became afraid they couldn’t live up to my expectations of them, and because of it weren’t comfortable with themselves. I wondered where the burden of responsibility for such breakdowns lay. Was it with me for demanding too much? Or did it lie with a feeling of low self-esteem the men had in themselves?
I remembered going to several psychologist friends about the question, and they pointed out that behind every woman that a man found himself involved with was the haunting image of his own mother. And their mothers were the figures they couldn’t live up to. Very few men saw their own women clearly. Instead they perceived them through the haunting screens of their mothers. And thinking of going to Sweden to meet Gerry, I remembered a very well documented research report I had read studying the problem of Swedish suicide. The high suicide rate was not caused by socialism or the weather or any of the popular cocktail-conversation myths. Instead, they found that most of the Swedish suicides were caused by the high standards and expectations that Swedish mothers placed upon their children who in turn felt they simply couldn’t “live up to it.” And out of intense depression and frustration, they felt so inadequate they resorted to suicide.
Maybe men everywhere were suffering a less intense but still disturbing sense of double imagery where women were concerned.
And in this age of female liberation, where women complained about feeling addicted to having to have a man, men might be suffering from these childhood pressures that exposed a basic lack of belief in themselves, which was just as devastating for them. In both cases, the problem lay in self identity. Gerry said he couldn’t understand why he was important to me, as though he, with all his intelligence and talents a
nd accomplishments, wasn’t worth my attention. He was obviously and publicly a very successful man. So his sense of inadequacy had to come from something deep inside. And just by my acknowledging that he was very important to me in a very personal sense, I was bringing his own personal insecurities to the surface.
So female liberation was certainly important, but it seemed to me that male liberation was just as important. In fact, if men were freer about who they really were, it wouldn’t be so necessary for them to colonize the women in their lives to such an extent. Maybe, in my case, because I was so personally uncolonizable, it made them examine the real meaning of equality. And if there was resistance to true equality in the relationship, it would inevitably dissolve. And how could a man feel equal if he didn’t believe he was worth loving?
I didn’t know anything about Gerry’s mother, but in the long run it didn’t matter. The real question was what he now thought of himself. It seemed to be the question for all of us.
I began to realize, from a new perspective, that self realization was the most painful but important search of all. None of us felt whole and self-loving enough to understand that our own self-identity was the answer to a fulfilled happiness. What we really needed most was a complete relationship within ourselves. Maybe that very problem—either in human or cosmic terms—was what Moses and Christ and Buddha and Pythagoras and Plato and all the religious and philosophical sages down through the ages had been trying to tell us … know thyself and that truth will set you free.
Suppose one of the paths to understanding who each of us really was lay in having knowledge of who we might have been in lifetimes previous? There were many examples where psychiatry just didn’t seem able to go deep enough to get to the root of an individual disturbance. Maybe past-life understanding could. If mothers and fathers and childhood experiences in our present lifetimes molded and conditioned how we related to life and reality today, why couldn’t experiences that went even further back affect us in the same way?
I remembered speaking to Paddy Chayevsky, before he died, about the novel he was writing, Altered States. He had done extensive scientific research on it and was saying that every human being carries, locked in his or her cellular memory, the entire experience of the human race from the beginning of creation. I guess my mind was following along the same lines. What was the difference between cellular memory recall from the beginning of time and past-life recall? Surely one form of memory was at least as miraculous as the other.
I wondered if I might in fact have known Gerry in another life, and if I had, what our karma was that we were going through such an obstacle course in our relationship now. And I wondered if we were going about working it out in the right way.
I called Cat and said I was going to Stockholm. She wasn’t surprised. She gave me the address and telephone number of the trance medium and I said I would look him up.
Chapter 9
“A lifetime may be needed merely to gain the virtues which annul the errors of man’s preceding life.… The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others—existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.”
—HONORÉ DE BALZAC
SERAPHITA
I had been to Stockholm several times on tour and it was a place that intrigued me. The city lay under wall-to-wall snow when I arrived, looking like a picture postcard from a Nordic fantasy.
A friend I called met me at the airport.
It was seven o’clock in the evening. A veil of snow filtered down and I wondered how soon it got dark every day during the famous Swedish winters. I had been to Sweden once before during the winter and when my nose ran it froze on my face. During those days in the late fifties Sweden was something of a social and physical mystery to those of us who had heard only a little about the small country that had voted for socialism. I remember feeling chilled stirrings when I sat in the hall where the Nobel Peace Prizes were given and heard that there was no preferred seating or class distinction in Sweden. I had heard it was a country of free love and if a wife or husband wanted to sleep with somebody else, no one cared. But I had come to learn that that image was not accurate, and that many Swedes found such an image difficult to live with; particularly the Swedish women. They were basically as conservative as everyone else in the world, even though government policy allowed more legalized personal freedom than anywhere on earth.
I had been in Sweden during the Festival of Lights called Santa Lucia which commemorated the end of the long dark days and the beginning of the slow trek toward another summer. Swedes lived for the sun and seemed to hibernate in their minds until it came. A kind of institutionalized depression came over the Swedish people during the winter months—which was most of the year. “Summer came on a Tuesday last year” was a favorite Swedish joke. The winter in Sweden certainly wasn’t going to lighten my relationship with Gerry.
My friend took me to dinner and after some oysters and herring, I went to the hotel where he had made a reservation for me in a small suite overlooking the harbor. The living room had bay windows and the bedroom a double bed. I knew I would be happy there. I fell into bed and about four hours later woke up with the urge to vomit, which I did for the rest of the night. It was one of the oysters.
The sun came out about nine the next morning to a day that was overcast from then on and slightly misty. A sheet of ice in the bay across the street was broken up every hour by a tugboat that circled around and around while lines of dump trucks piled all the snow they had scraped from the streets that morning into the bay. Sightseeing boats lay clutched in the ice in the surrounding frozen water waiting for spring to come.
I had breakfast and went for a short walk. I wanted to be in when Gerry called so I hurried back. Slick ice packed the city streets but the Swedes had no trouble at all negotiating corners and curbs. I felt as though I’d fall down at every juncture.
When I returned to the hotel, the woman manager came to see me asking if I had any requests. After asking for a hair dryer with Swedish current and an extra blanket, I was sure I’d be very comfortable.
There was a private entrance to the hotel where anyone leaving or entering could do so unnoticed and she promised that the telephone operators would protect my identity from the journalists.
I waited in my room for the rest of the day. Around six o’clock he called.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“When did you get in?”
“Yesterday evening.”
“Yesterday evening? I thought you’d be coming in around five o’clock today.”
“No,” I said, “I told you I was coming on the 16th.”
“Oh. Can I come over?”
“Sure. Have you had anything to eat?”
“No, I’ll stop along the way.”
“Come now. I’ll have something here for you. That way you’ll get here sooner.”
“All right. Goodbye.”
His voice sounded more authoritative, as if he was in command of himself.
I left the room door open so he wouldn’t have to wait after he knocked. And in about half an hour, there he was.
He came in wearing big fur gloves, the ones I imagined his wife disapproved of, looking very white and drawn.
I crossed the room to embrace him, but he went straight to the window and looked out, getting his bearings on where my hotel was in relation to his.
He wore his trench coat with no fur lining, a tweed suit that I had seen in the fall, and a pair of leather shoes with big rubber soles.
“My grandmother became very famous,” he said, “for skating on thin ice in a bay like that wearing a skirt that was only a few inches below the knees.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe you’ll become famous for skating on thin ice wearing trousers.”
He smiled.
He walked to th
e other window. “And see the string of lights that look like a penis at the top? Just beyond that is my hotel.”
A rising string of lights looked like a penis to him? Interesting …
I stood next to him at the window. He turned from the window and cupped one of my breasts in his hand.
I invited him to sit down with me. I had ordered two double decker club sandwiches that had turned out to be lettuce and tomato salad on toast.
He sat on the sofa and began to cut into one of the sandwiches. He talked of upcoming budget cuts, the problems of having to raise taxes in an election year, and an American journalist whom he had been talking to all day. He asked me how my rehearsals were going. I said I would be starting soon. While I talked his eyes sopped me up—my hair, my movements, my clothes, my body … but he didn’t touch me. I, in turn, felt too intimidated to touch him. We continued to talk … about the boat people from Vietnam and how much happier they would be in France if Europe was where they wanted to go, Sihanouk at the United Nations and the fact that the English Left was split down the middle on the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. We avoided the subject of us until we both got our bearings.
He lay back on the sofa. I could feel he was exhausted, and that he had been that way for some time. And I could feel that he knew it was all right for me to know. I sat close to him and touched his hair. He didn’t object. He leaned his head against the back of the sofa. His arms rested in his lap. He didn’t reach for me at all. I laid my head on his chest and looking up at him I kissed him gently on the lips. They were still slightly cold from the weather outside. Lifting his head, he turned away from me and slowly reached for more of his sandwich. I waited for him to finish.
He lay back again and sighed.
“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you let me give you a massage? You don’t have to do anything but lie there. Okay?”
Immediately he got up and headed for the bedroom. He turned around and waited for me to take off his coat and shirt and tie. I tried but I couldn’t get his tie undone. He laughed.
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