OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  Even with his monumental account of the beginning of Creation, this entity Ambres seemed to have an understanding of humor on a human level. I wondered how long ago he had been human, or if he ever had been, but the session raced on beyond my mundane questions. I could only feel that everyone present was more advanced than I. I sat back and tried to absorb what was happening.

  Ambres-Sturé would get up and walk around the room with a hunched-over stride. He appeared to be nothing like the Sturé I had met. Sometimes he laughed deeply and made jokes to emphasize a point. He went to a drawing pad tacked up on the wall and drew diagrams and cosmic geometric designs and spirals to make his descriptions more graphic. He asked the group questions as though he was a master teacher conducting a class. The group was involved and excited, confused sometimes over a crucial point which he patiently explained again. A few times he scolded someone who obviously hadn’t done his homework. Then he sat down next to Turid again.

  “The instrument is losing his energy,” said Ambres. “He must now revitalize.”

  He said he hoped he would have an encounter with us again. He said we should take care of each other. Then, he said a prayer in his ancient tongue giving thanks to God for the opportunity to serve.

  Sturé trembled. The electrical charge known as Ambres seemed to leave his body. Turid quickly thrust water into her husband’s hands. Sturé drank all of it. He slowly came around to his own consciousness and stood up.

  I looked around not knowing what to think. The guests talked quietly among themselves, asked me if I understood enough of the Swedish to comprehend what was going on, and I said yes, not wanting to admit that the process itself would take me awhile to understand, much less the information. But they seemed to understand anyway and said once I found it acceptable, it would be beneficial for me.

  Beneficial? It was enough to scramble my brains. I was just glad I had read the Cayce stuff before coming.

  I walked over to Sturé.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I hope you’re all right. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Sturé shook my hand as Lars translated. He seemed tired but calm. His eyes looked liquid and kind. He said he hoped I had learned something from Ambres, said he would like to talk to him someday himsel and gave a little shrug as though he didn’t understand what was really going on either. I was struck by his direct simplicity. Turid put her arm around me.

  “Ambres is a great teacher,” she said. “I’m so glad you could hear him. Sturé needs to rest now.”

  She guided Lars and Birgitta and me to the door and said we could talk tomorrow if I wanted.

  We said goodnight to everyone and left. Snow was falling outside. The snow man in the sandbox was a square bulk now, newly fashioned by fresh snow as the children of the neighborhood slept.

  The three of us walked under the white sky to the car.

  “What did you think?” asked Lars.

  I wanted to say something profound.

  “I guess I need time to think,” I stalled.

  “You know,” I said, “I’m beginning to feel that I was somehow guided to come here. There’s too much happening to me lately to believe in accidents anymore. I think I was supposed to come to Stockholm.”

  Lars and Birgitta smiled and led me through the falling snow to the car. We didn’t say anything to each other.

  Then, as we drove back to Stockholm, each lost in our own thoughts, I began to wonder about the string of “coincidences” in my life. I was aware that I was beginning to feel some preordained plan, unfolding according to my own awareness and willingness to accept what I was ready for. As though the events and incidents were bound to happen if I let them. The timing was up to me, but the inevitability felt fixed and predestined. I was surprised at what I was thinking. I had never believed in such things. Yet the serried coincidences of my relationship with Gerry: its very nature, based on earthbound frustrations, political realities, and negative obstacles coincidental (that word again!) with my slow friendship and understanding of David with his spiritual point of view—all this was greatly forcing on me an awareness of other dimensions.

  I seemed to be a middle-ground observer of dual realities. And I felt I was gradually developing an understanding of both points of view which, as I thought about it, seemed to represent the dualities in life (something like what my father pointed out)—the grounded Earth reality and the Cosmic Spiritual reality. Maybe they were both supposed to be necessary for human happiness. It was becoming more and more clear to me that to call one point of view the only true reality was limited, prejudiced, and probably incorrect. Maybe all human beings were Mind, Body, and Spirit as the great ancients had tried to tell us. That was their legacy. Maybe I had to relearn it.

  I said goodbye to Lars and Birgitta and said I’d be in touch.

  Chapter 11

  “There is a principle which is proof against all information, which is proof against all arguments, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt, prior to investigation.”

  —HERBERT SPENCER

  When I walked into my hotel room, the telephone was ringing. I picked it up.

  “Hi,” said Gerry. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I’m a few days late.”

  “That’s okay. I know you were busy.”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “The snow on the trees is paradise.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the countryside must be beautiful.”

  “My wife came from London.”

  I felt the breath go out of me. I didn’t know what to say. I felt paralyzed. Had he known she was going to come? Had he asked her to come?

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “Well …” he said, “I’ll be over later.”

  “Yes, sure. I’ll be here.”

  I went into a tailspin. I felt sick and angry. My stomach felt as if it had a hole in it. I wondered what Edgar Cayce or Ambres would prescribe for this and tried to force my mind into a peaceful and spiritual space. I couldn’t. I decided they were full of crap when it came to living a reality on Earth. I managed to laugh at the vulgarity of my thought.

  When Gerry came to me I was withdrawn. I couldn’t communicate. We made love, but I was afraid. He said nothing—either about his wife’s presence or my reaction. Neither did I.

  He asked me if I thought his hair smelled of perfume. I said he knew I wasn’t wearing any and hadn’t for months.

  When I opened the bathroom door to see if he needed anything, I saw his huge body crouched in the tub in an embryonic position, washing and looking as though he hadn’t been born yet.

  He was gone for the next two days and nights.

  I wrote. I wrote everything I was feeling.

  I wrote until my head spun. I relived everything that was happening. I wrote to understand it. I wrote to decide what to do. I tried to hang on to who I was, what I wanted, what I wanted to do with or without Gerry. I wrote to try to understand myself. I wrote about my life and my thoughts and my questions. I wrote for days.

  Whenever Gerry called I told him I was writing. He said he was glad I was doing something. It made him feel less guilty about not being able to see me. I told him he needn’t worry. I was one person who would always find something to do. Then I felt guilty that I was writing partly about him and not saying so.

  On the sixth night he finished working at about nine-thirty, called, and said he wanted to come to me but felt he should go home to his wife. I said fine.

  I wrote well into that night, and got up at six and began again. I never left my hotel room. I wrote what I was living and feeling, like an extended diary, a way of talking to myself.

  He came the next night. We ate and talked. He ate kiwi fruit and melon. He wore a thin turquoise tie which was a gift from the small town he had visited the day before. His hair fell across his forehead as he
gestured with his hands cupped and scooping into the air. I made no move toward him at all.

  I crossed the room to get him more tea. He reached out, stopped me, and pulled me to him. I stood still. Slowly and with delicate sweetness he kissed my eyes, my chin, my hair, and finally my lips. He encircled me with his arms. I left mine beside my body. He pressed himself against me. I stood still.

  With a kind of sly certainty he led me into the bedroom. I didn’t want to go. He was taking the initiative and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. He lowered me onto the bed and kissed me long and deeply as though he was experimenting with his own right to take what he wanted. I responded but with no aggressiveness. He pulled my thick wool sweater off and felt my body underneath. His hands moved all over me.

  He undid my slacks and pulled them off. His hands wound in and around and underneath me. He reached up and held my head and squeezed my hair.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “I said I love you.”

  I said nothing.

  Then like a dam bursting, he cried, “I love you, I love you, I love you …”

  We lay together until some kind of reality swam back into focus.

  He sat up and looked over me and out of the window. His face looked a hundred years old, as though his mind had seeped through it and dripped down his cheeks. He looked down at me.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked. It was the first time he had inquired about what I was thinking.

  “I’m thinking about how unreal all of this is,” I said. “I’ve been in this room watching a tugboat going in circles breaking ice. I’ve watched six layers of snow fall over the curb downstairs. I’ve eaten Swedish crackers and butter and nothing else. I’ve written and written and written until my hand aches. I’ve become the furniture and the rug and the cold air. And now you’re here. You’re here and it’s so unreal to me.”

  “Maybe what we’re doing is what’s more real,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe.” I shook my head to shock myself back to normal. “So now,” I said, “you have to return to your unreality.”

  He got up and headed for the shower. I remained lying on the bed. He turned around and ran back into the bedroom.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I held him in my arms.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He beamed. His dark eyes glistened. He walked toward the shower again. Again he returned.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I love you too.”

  “But I still can’t understand why. I still can’t understand why you want me.”

  “Neither can I,” I answered. “In fact, most of this I don’t understand.”

  He shook his head.

  “And more than anything else,” he said, “I want to spend a whole night with you again.”

  “I think,” I said, “it’s because you can’t have that right now.”

  “No, I know myself better than that.”

  He nodded seriously. He got up again. This time he made it to the shower. He returned wet and cold. I dried him off. He pulled me towards him and hugged me close.

  I dried his hair with the hair dryer while he, put on his shoes and socks.

  When he was dressed we discussed his schedule for the next two days. He had meetings and press conferences.

  I told him I had to get back to America soon. He said he couldn’t see me the next day; it was crammed too full. I said fine, it didn’t matter.

  He put on his coat and fur gloves and walked to the door. Instead of proceeding through it as he usually did, he turned around and said, “And how’s your writing coming?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine. I’m just not sure where I’m going with it.”

  He looked at me. “Maybe it should just fade away,” he said. His words smacked the air. I didn’t know what he meant, or maybe I did.

  He winked at me and said, “Ciao,” and closed the door behind him.

  Deep confusion swept over me. Then it was followed by guilt … then a kind of double vision. I didn’t know what was real again. I hated the feeling. To be unclear about the emotional horizon was the worst thing that could happen to me.

  I started writing again—I had no one to talk to but myself. My self.

  Everything seemed to be feeling like an illusion. Was it an illusion? Was physical reality only what I thought it was anyway? A simple day in the life of anyone was just a series of acting scenes; acting what we thought we felt. Shakespeare had said it. Maybe all of life was a stage and we were merely actors on that stage playing out our roles. Was he talking about reincarnation when he wrote that? So, if today was acting, was yesterday an illusion? And tomorrow?

  Maybe Gerry and our meetings and my work and our world wouldn’t even be there tomorrow. Or, maybe what was driving me crazy was the pressure to define reality in physical terms. Perhaps the truth was that everything was real on every level because everything was relative and needed to be taken into account. Maybe we loved and laughed and worked and played in an unconscious effort to remind ourselves that we must have a purpose beyond this reality. If that purpose was real, was each of us using someone else to bounce off so as to define our own purpose more clearly? Did we simply use others we loved to try out our own hidden potentials, our unseen capacities to get some definition of our selves? Were we looking for the source of our own meaning from another time? Or had we actually known each other before? Were Gerry and I really working out some relationship that had been unresolved in another life? If that was so, and if somehow we came to understand that, perhaps then we would no longer need one another. Was that the final joke? Maybe that was the profound reason for humor. Maybe all of life was a colossal cosmic joke because it would continue on its own course regardless of what we did or didn’t do. Maybe we should just smile our way to the end, because maybe the end was only the beginning anyway. It might be true that the cycle would start all over again until we got it right. That really wasn’t so bad. We’d certainly not need to fear death. If death never even happened, then life was a joke on us. So, we might as well smile through it while we worked our way through our purpose.

  Gerry became more clear in my mind. As I wrote about him I understood things more objectively. I began to see his role in my life with more clarity. I wasn’t so compulsively intense about either his or my confusion and I began to feel that whatever we meant in each other’s lives had a reason, a purpose behind it. In the scheme of his life and in the scheme of mine, the purpose might not be so clear now, but it probably would be soon.

  I wrote as though I were talking to myself. The hours melted into one another. I never left the hotel room. I began to wear the walls. I knew every circle of the tugboat doing its icy duty each day in the bay below my window by heart. I watched the days become longer with each successive snowstorm. And now, at the end of another week, the city below me lay carpeted in white, while a veil of new snow made it even whiter.

  I walked through the snow. I must have walked five miles … through the city and into the animal park, rolling knolls of white snow cream spreading all around me. The sun was sharp and crisp. I felt I could hear myself breathe in the silence miles ahead of myself. Three deer watched me as I walked by them ankle deep in snow, crunching softly. I held my head to the sun. Five white swans flew across it. A man walked by in the distance smoking a pipe.

  Gerry hung silently in the air with me as I walked. He was like this air, this country, this environment. It was a pastel environment, not overtly splashed with color or accents. It was an environment that seemed to cover its intentions, as though its real meaning was hidden. It didn’t reach out—it lay back almost waiting to be discovered, to be touched, to be walked through and understood. It wasn’t exactly afraid of itself as one might think at first. No, it waited on itself instead; with its long, silent patience, those who were new to it might feel rejected and excluded from integrating into it. But th
at wouldn’t be a legitimate response. That wouldn’t be giving the detached stillness a chance to come out of itself.

  And so maybe it was with people.

  To feel emotionally starved because of the lack of overt clarity and discernible communication was to deny the inner richness of communicating with silence. Indeed, the silence could probably be even more full, and if I felt a victim of no communication, that was my problem because it probably wasn’t true. I had been used to explosive communication in my life. What I was experiencing now was implosive communication. I had to find what was inside of me and so did Gerry.

  I walked all day and came home just in time to see Gerry on Swedish television discussing Third World economic problems.

  I had heard it all before but watched carefully anyway. He was assured and strong in the way he presented his proposed solutions. I was reading the Herald Tribune, waiting for his call, when I heard the hotel door open.

  He looked as though he had run all the way. He was totally out of breath, his face frozen, his eyebrows and eyelashes sparkling with melting snow. I kissed him quickly. He was still on a “high,” vivacious and anxious to know what I thought of his appearance on television. We talked about how he was learning to orchestrate his personality for TV. He ate two chocolate-filled biscuits and drank lukewarm tea. We talked about Jimmy Carter and China and the variety show I hoped to do from Peking. We talked about everything under the sun but what was concerning me most. I decided it was time to introduce Gerry to the things that had been happening to me—to us—the things I had been writing about (he had not asked).

  “Gerry?” I said bravely.

  “Hmm …”

  “Are you curious about what I’ve been writing about?”

  He looked surprised. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

  “It’s about us,” I went on, and seeing the look of carefully checked alarm on his face, “in a way, that is.”