by Cauble, Don
Naomi liked the poem I had written for Sandy. What she did not like, what made her feel terribly sad, she said, was the fact that her husband could write this intimate and romantic poem to another woman. I had no quarrel with her feelings. I had my own pain and the dance, the wine, the fire, the poem—these gave me some place to step, if only for a moment, outside the pain.
I didn't plan to give Sandy the poem. I knew that could really create grief for me. And might even put Sandy off. After all, I was married and she might think I was being a little weird. Besides, Sandy had her own problems. She was stuck in a bad relationship, the kind I'd seen before. Her lover was having an affair with her best friend. You can bet your life savings I didn't want to touch that one.
"Can't we come ALIVE without going through all this pain?" Naomi wanted to know. "I'm tired of all this pain."
That night, and the nights to follow, Naomi and I had long talks by the fire about our marriage. Night after night I got raked over the coals. I couldn't argue with her accusations. After all, I had done such and such, when was it? Three years ago? Last week? Naomi's indictments overwhelmed me. She had such a way of making things so final. She kept hammering me and I kept taking it. I felt like I was swallowing swords.
§
from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times
(an unpublished novel)
Total Fire, Finally
(As told by his wife)
1
"STAMINA OF SURVIVORS TAXED BUT STILL FIRM"
blares the February 22 Oregonian headline
Yeah, he says, my eyes want to close, too
For Christmas, he gave me a new belt to keep
my pants up, and I gave him a set of
stacking dolls made in the USSR.
A doll within a doll within a doll within
a doll. "I'll be your," Dylan croons, "baby
tonight!" My lover gives me
a pair of used suspenders to keep
my pants up, I laugh, I don't seem to be
doing a good job of it.
2
RIGHT, WHAT'S LEFT
Existing on Murine, aspirin and strong cups of coffee
trying to kill myself on no sleep, cigarettes, wine
driving, driving, driving
no peace, all pieces, everything falls apart
this house, my car, my life, all pieces
everything I do is wrong, up and dressed by the time
he brings morning coffee, he wanted to sit in bed and talk
Thank you, I say, he turns his back and leaves the room
THANK YOU! I scream and he mumbles, you're welcome,
by this time tears down my face as I strip my clothes
off in emotional frustration, okay, we'll sit in bed and talk
all I wanted was a cup of coffee
(and I need ten more hours of sleep...)
My physical body is down to 103 pounds and struggles
to keep the pace, my emotional body is spent
my spiritual body hangs on by a thin thread
my intellectual body spins like a Whirling Dervish
finds no place to stop and rest
this bed feels like a truck stop now
Last night, he pours hot boiling water into my bath,
averting his eyes because he can't bear to see my nakedness
and furious because I'm writing, he thinks,
a letter to my lover halfway around the world,
gone to experience Tantric Meditation with
some unknown lady leaving
two here, experiencing celibacy within
marriage, marriage, marriage, what marriage?
My poet-husband reads a poem I wrote
I see the wheels turning in his head!
He's gonna steal my lines! That's what poets do
best, he laughs.
3
FINALLY, TOTAL FIRE
Very calmly, she folds the marriage certificate
in half...
tears it neatly on the fold, separating
the half signed by the Groom
from the half signed by the Bride.
Half of that is mine,
he said.
So she gave him his side
and with frustration, and in his quick anger
he crumples the paper and throws it
into the fireplace,
within seconds
transformed to smoke and ashes.
And she, with her deliberate
slowness
lights a corner by the small
flame of an orange candle
and after what seemed like Forever,
hers too, turned to ashes.
Very carefully, she placed the ashes
into an envelope and sealed it.
A reminder that once,
finally,
she'd seen the Total Fire.
Turning the wheel
Where are you running, Friend?
Where will you go to lose yourself
and find who you truly are?
To the Rajneesh Ashram in India?
One month in Poona and you grab the first flight out,
terrified for your life.
Will you go to Japan? Or to Europe,
or to Vermont in the fall;
or to Colorado,
to heal the roots you've been ground-burning
as quickly as they show?
Friend, you're running so fast
you've created a raging fire behind you,
and it is this fire you must go through,
to radiate light from the shadows of your heart.
(And you know this, don't you?)
What frightens you, Friend?
What makes you so desperate—like an outlaw?
and there is a natural law we cannot escape!—
that you run so fast you keep repeating yourself,
endlessly turning on the wheel.
Is it the thought of death? Of time running out?
Is it ego? Or desire? Or just jealousy?
Is it thirst or need or lust for power?
Or, like Oedipus, a roundabout journey
to the death of a man you never really knew?
Where are you running, Friend?
Where will you go to lose yourself
and find who you truly are?
All these things twice
You were stumbling a little,
to my surprise,
and singing:
"I want four walls around me,
to hold my life..."
Coming back from Caesar's Country Western Bar
& Dance,
do you remember walking in the park
and sitting beneath that giant fir tree,
and watching a city bus go by
as we talked about our marriage
and the night sky,
and wondering aloud
if, in ten years, we would remember
this, sitting in the park at night
a little drunk,
and a whole lot scared;
winter in the air
and the dry leaves thick on the grass
by the sidewalk,
do you remember?
*****
"I want to spend the night with Eden," Naomi told me.
She said it as if she were asking permission.
I stared at her. I didn't say anything.
"You don't need to worry," she said. "I'm not going to run off with him the way Angelina did."
Still, I said nothing as Naomi kept assuring me she wasn't like Angelina, that she wouldn't leave me. Going to Eden, getting to know him better before he left for India, this, she said, was something she needed to do.
What could I say? Yes, I could say, No.
But I wasn't her daddy.
How could I tell her what to do or not to do?
No more than I could tell Angelina, five years ago.
We had returned from Europe.
"What do I do?" Angelina asked. I could only tell her what I would have told myself. And what I knew she would do anyway. "Follow your heart," I said. "That's what I've always done."
The affair between Eden and Angelina didn't last long. Which didn't surprise me. What surprised me was the attraction between them in the first place. They seemed to have little in common, other than their connection with me. Angelina and I belonged to the same spirit tribe. We were kindred souls. But not so much with Eden. Yet, I felt deeply drawn to the man, so why not Angelina? Maybe he challenged her on some level. Maybe she thought she could heal his wounded soul. For certainly she's a healer. And certainly Eden showed glimmers of light. But mostly, he lived in the shadows. (Don't worry, Merika. I tested him with a mirror, just to make sure.) I saw in him a great instinctual knowledge, and great power, and yet something had gone wrong. Something in him had gotten twisted, bent out of shape.
One weekend, several years before I married Angelina and went to Greece, a bunch of us were at the Oregon coast, climbing a long, grassy bluff that overlooked the ocean. We walked a path on a protected game reserve and a herd of wild goats scattered as we made our way up the thin footpath. Eden led the way, as if he had been chosen leader. He carried a wooden staff and, with his strong body, piercing eyes, and the coastal wind blowing his long, dark hair, he seemed like a reincarnation of Moses leading his people to the Promised Land. He had charisma and charm and he told great stories, lacing them with exaggerated humor or terror, or enthusiasm. "A beautiful asshole," that's how someone once described him.
In those days, I saw Eden Maldek as a seeker, a contemplative, a soul who had found himself—or lost himself—in this great mystery called life and, like myself, he was looking to make sense of it all. We didn't pal around together, and sometimes I wondered why not. I couldn't even get mad at him for what happened between him and Angelina. Those things happened. Especially back then. To all of us. We got bounced around like billiard balls all over the table. Or like small boats on a river in turbulent weather. And, no matter what happened, we knew that just around the next bend we'd find still another grand adventure. None of us had a permanent home. We had no allegiance to any cause except to experience life.
For all that Angelina meant to me, for all that I loved her, and for all the great and intense memories we shared together in Greece, life would go on. She was married when I first met her. You could say that what comes around goes around. We had found each other at the right time. We had traveled to Paris and backpacked over Europe. We had made love under the bluest skies in this world and swam naked in the sea that gave birth to Aphrodite. We had lost each other in Greece and had to face humpty dumpty dangers alone. Certainly, for myself, I had to go through trial by fire and water. We had been shattered and transformed, both of us. I mean, how much heaven and earth can a man and woman stand together?
Eventually, Eden and I got back together again as friends. He knew about Anna and me, about what had happened between us that summer I returned from Europe. He never really said anything, but I knew it pissed him off. Eden felt like a brother to me, yet, as the poet d. a. levy once said, during his slow suicide in Cleveland, Ohio—no doubt about the time his wife and another poet spent the night together smoking dope and screwing their brains out: "If brothers were good for anything, God would have had one."
Maybe Eden carried a grudge against me for giving him an old TV set. This happened before I met Angelina. Eden had rented a small house in a nest of tall fir trees on the other side of Portland. I had a black and white TV I hardly ever watched. A big one, not a portable. Oh, I watched Star Trek returns some of the time, but mostly I shunned the damn thing. Like snakes, TVs fascinate us, don't they? I can't be in the same room with one on without my eyes going to it, no matter what's playing, so I just don't want the blasted thing in the house. TVs are like sugar. A little sugar on your breakfast cereal, how much harm can that do? However, to sit in front of a whole bowl of the white stuff and spoon it in like a good soup, that seems self-destructive to me.
Eden came home from work one day and found his house had burned to the ground. He lost practically everything he owned. They said the TV had caused the fire. Hey, just call us Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
However, there was a difference between us.
A real difference.
Eden carried a bitterness and a covert anger in his heart toward women. Most of the time, around me, he tried to keep this anger well hidden. He didn't want me to see this part of him, I later realized. He exposed his rage in casual slips here and there. Crude slips. Calling them "cunts." Mistrusting them. Using them. What shameful secret lay in his past? I wondered.
So, I stood there, bewildered and hurt, when Naomi told me she wanted to spend the night with Eden. I stood there silent, looking at Naomi, looking at history coming around again, looking at loss, looking at Naomi lying. Did she really think she could take a lover, just like that? Another woman might, yes. But I knew Naomi too well. I knew she couldn't love two men at once. No way.
Yet, she wanted me to believe this.
I suppose she wanted to believe this, too. Because Eden was leaving for India, perhaps that's why she thought she could sleep with him, that she could take a lover and still keep her marriage.
Finally I said: "Do what you need to do."
If I slept at all, I don't remember it. I got out of bed about five o'clock and made a cup of coffee. I built a fire. When Scotty woke, he found me sitting on the floor crying by the fire. He had never seen me cry before. He did the best thing he knew to do. He went and got his favorite big red truck and tried to get me to play. I hugged him for a moment.
"I'll make some breakfast," I said, "You get dressed."
"Where's Mom?"
"Oh, she's with a friend. She'll be home later."
He accepted that.
"I'll walk you to school this morning."
Scotty was a neat kid. But willful as hell. Always had been, since he could crawl, and he was always coming up with a slight-of-hand mind trick to get his way, as if he didn't think we could see his obvious manipulations. True to his Scorpio birthright, you could say, if you're inclined to speak in astrological concepts. And always testing his limits and believing that he had none. The time we went camping at Crater Lake, Scotty looked down from the guarded rim of the crater to the deep blue calm water of the lake and announced matter-of-factly: "I could climb down there." Yeah, right, Scotty.
This camping trip was the same trip the bear came into our campsite and ran off with our bag of bagels. The bear grabbed the bag of bagels as Naomi hurriedly put things into the back of our Datsun wagon, after we'd been warned by the Park Ranger about the bear. The bear dropped the bagels, but then came back—I suppose for the quart of milk. I grabbed my ax and chased him out of the camp and into the dark woods. Later that night, I hardly dared to fall asleep, thinking that only a canvas tent shielded us from the bear, should he attempt to break in. The night before, he had ripped into a tent across the road.
This last Christmas Day, Scotty went outside the house to play. He was on the sidewalk and I stood on our front porch watching him. A girl his own age came up to him. I'd never seen the girl before.
Little girl: "What's your name?"
Scotty: "If I tell you my name, will you be my friend?"
Little girl: "Sure."
Scotty (with emphasis): "My name is Godzilla!"
The little girl quickly left.
I remember how surprised I was to hear his first spoken sentence. He was looking out the window at a bird in a tree. Suddenly he cried, "Bird go bye-bye!" Another time, right after Mt. St. Helens blew her top and covered our North Portland house and most of the city in ash, we were standing across the street with some neighbors watching a new giant plume of smoke shoot into the air above the volcano. Scotty got concerned. "Why do we let the volcano do that?" he asked.
"Well, Scotty..."
*****
I walked Scotty and his friend, Cary, t
o school. I had already called in sick for work. When I got back from school, Naomi was home. Her hair was still damp from a shower.
"I took Scotty to school." That's all I said.
I wanted a cup of tea.
In spite of my pain and humiliation, I felt glad to see her. The panic inside me went away. I knew, however, that she needed anger, not hurt, not tears, not vulnerability.
By the time I made tea, my sadness turned to anger. "Goddamnit!" I swore at her.
Naomi kept looking at me, her gaze unwavering.
I didn't ask her what had happened.
"Even now I desire you," I told her.
"Well, I should hope so," she replied.
I flew out of my chair and grabbed her. We kissed crazily as I pushed my hand into her jeans. She came alive, wet, hot. I pulled her into our bedroom, knocking over a chair as I went. I flung her onto the bed. I ripped her flannel shirt off in one yank, buttons flying across the bed. I pulled her jeans and panties down and tossed them on the floor. I rolled her over, face down on the bed.
I took my belt from my jeans. I had never hit a woman in my life. I had no desire to hurt Naomi. Yet, what I did next seemed right to me. Even in my show of anger, however, I felt like an actor. I felt confused, not understanding what she really wanted from me. Recently, since this thing between her and Eden, our love making had changed. We played a game that she initiated. She called this game, "Taking it, if I want it." She would struggle with me and push me away and wouldn't open her legs. I had to overcome her, which wasn't always that easy, before she would take me inside her. I smacked her several times across her buttocks. Hard enough that her lover would see marks the next time he fucked her. Naomi rolled over. She looked at me. She didn't utter a word. I grabbed her and kissed her mouth. Her beautiful, sweet mouth. She opened her legs for me. I licked her pussy and she was dripping wet. I sucked her and she started coming.