by Cauble, Don
I looked frantically for thick bushes. Or a big tree. Maybe an alley. Any place where we could drop out of sight and I could get her skirt up. China had on a long-sleeved blouse and a dressy, ankle-length skirt and boots. The top two buttons on her blouse were undone and the soft material fell sensually over her shoulders and clung to her shapely breasts. She had trimmed her hair short. She looked sexy as hell. All the time I'd known her, counting the night we met at the bar, I had seen her in a dress only two or three times. She always wore jeans and simple feminine tees or knit polos or jewel-neck blouses without the jewelry. She dressed scantily, even in cool weather. She caught colds easily, she said, and I wondered if it was because of her cigarette smoking or from the way she hardly dressed.
Nothing. I saw nothing to hide us.
She finished her cigarette.
What the hell was I thinking, anyway?
"Thinking, that's good," she said. "To act… I only wish I could."
Not long after our luncheon at Café Du Berry, I had three dreams about China. In one, she wore a dress that belonged to Naomi. I thought that quite odd. Our marriage had lasted six years. And Naomi—like China—almost never wore a dress. My dreams turned increasingly sexual. In the third dream, China and I came that close to making love. Then, suddenly, in the dream, I changed my mind. I woke from the dream, thinking I had made a clear choice. I felt as though I'd been there before. I HAD been there before.
I mean, Get serious, David.
Yet, here we were, at happy hour, in an Italian restaurant called Picolo Mondo, drinking Spanish coffees together and talking about our lives and not knowing what to do with our feelings. And then hugging in the parking lot, China pressing her warm body against mine, her kisses stunning me.
"If we don't stop now…" She pulled away, laughing.
I walked to my car in a slight daze. For I really did feel stunned. A very odd feeling. Odd, but certainly not unpleasant; not like anything I could remember. Not an emotional sensation, but a physical one. As if I'd been zapped on the mouth all the way down to my toes. I thought of certain South American natives who put a poisonous plant mixture on the tip of arrows when they hunt spider monkeys, not to kill the monkeys, but to stun and relax the animal's muscles so that the monkey does not cling to the tree and die high up there, but falls to the ground. But that seemed like such a predatory image. Dismiss that thought. And forget the Spanish coffee. Perhaps my friend China did have shamanistic powers, and she had, intentionally or unintentionally, kissed me from her place of power, this coming-into-her-own place of wildness and ferocity and untamed feminine energy deep within her.
In Laura Esquire's book, Like Water for Chocolate, the doctor, in part to win Tita's confidence, tells Tita about his grandmother's belief that we are all born with a box of matches inside us. We can't burn all these matches by ourselves. We need each other to light these matches.
And yet—
I don't know if this explains the fire between us. Still, just to think that I still had matches to burn, cheered me greatly. For I have burned a lot of matches. Like the poet Rumi, I have longed for the fire that comes from the Source. And God had come to me time and time again in the breath and heat and presence of a woman. Every woman that I've loved deeply has scorched me to the soul. Has burned away another veil. And I have opened my eyes continuously in wonder to the wisdom of the heart. So, I must have been born with a box chocked full of matches. Better matches, I thought, than chocolates. (But it's a close call.)
So what to do?
She didn't need rescuing.
That's not what China wanted.
She wanted to be free. She wanted to live alone with her daughter. That didn't mean, China assured me, I wouldn't be a part of her life. So she made plans. Practical plans. For she was a practical woman. Perhaps that's why she was fascinated by my passion. And I lived passionately, she told me, and she wanted to be close to that passion, to be a part of that passion. But not just now; now wasn't the time. She had other obligations. Her little girl. A dying mother she loved, who needed her.
Then I had another dream.
In this dream, I went to see a teacher, a well-known spiritual guru. And I met this girl, waiting alone in the darshan line. I call her a girl for she seemed youngish, not quite able to focus on spirit; her awareness fluttered, her energy flickered, like a butterfly. Yet I found myself drawn to her. And she to me. But should I get involved with her? She felt so un-here. Together we went in to see the teacher. We each had written a question and placed them in envelopes, and I put our two envelopes on the pillow before the teacher. He seemed amused by my confusion. He chuckled, and, without opening the envelopes, he answered my question. "Sometimes," he said, "it's necessary to make these loops. People think the spiritual path is easy. They come to a teacher for the answer." He laughed joyfully. "But then," he said, "they have to make the most difficult decisions of their lives."
Take care of your mother, I told China. Take care of your daughter.
Take care of yourself.
Then we'll see.
Yet, if China came near, I wavered, like the girl in my dream. Like an actor in search of direction. So, we stopped writing to each other. We stopped phoning. We kept our distances. We looked at our options, internally circling, like Coyote.
In the teachings of Coyote, Alora told me, life's journey doesn't travel in a straight line, but is circular, and so you can't leave parts of yourself "behind."
"If you have a goal, a desire," Coyote says, "don't approach it directly. Approach in a circular movement. Circle your goal. See its darkness. See its light. See it all. Then sniff it. If it smells good go you, wag your tail. If you can wag your tail, then approach and lie down next to it." But neither of us could "wag" our tails. Certainly I couldn't. In spite of her whispers that she loved me, in spite of her assurance, my doubt would not go away, no more than my desire would go away, no more than the moon would stay forever hidden behind clouds.
I wanted to journey into the darkness. Yet, I had no interest in the darkness called violence, or in the darkness called limitation, or in the darkness called evil—predators that feed upon each other. The best definition of evil I know came from my friend Alora. "Evil," she told me, "is that which does not comprehend or honor the interrelationship between all things. Evil is that which does not consider consequences." I'm not talking demons or angels. The angels do not, and cannot know this dark energy called the human soul. I'm talking the wound of love. I'm talking this earth. I'm talking the unhealed split within us.
I sense two great sides to this darkness within us: a part that nourishes, that regenerates, as the darkness of the earth nourishes the seed, as the womb nourishes the child, as lovers hold hands in the dark. These are hidden places, as the sun in the day hides the light of the stars. Yes, there exists another immense part that holds all our terror and fear and shame: those places of unclaimed power, those places of remorse and regret and sadness, those places that belong to the wholeness I AM.
After years of undoing the darkness within me, to the point that I could calmly say to the universe: "Yes, I want to know this darkness," I thought my direction would take me, like Percival, just down the road a little way, where I'd hang a left and cross the drawbridge and the Fisher King would welcome me to stay for the night as a guest, where we'd swap stories and drink wine, you know, the way good friends do when they haven't seen each other in a long time.
I did not know going into the darkness would bring up all the bittersweet memories of Naomi—memories that would eventually take me all the way back to my mother and the buried rage I felt against her God. I remember, not long after Naomi and I got together as lovers, looking into her "devilish, angelic" eyes and thinking, If I could reveal your secrets and how you play, but who would believe darkness and light are one?
Now, perhaps, I understood this. As the Buddhists teach: Start where you are.
I wanted a grand adventure, not a quiet and sobering look into the many ways
I had failed to love. I didn't want to relive those memories. I felt finished with the past. It's in the basement, along with old issue of Rolling Stones (the one with Bob Dylan interviews) and letters from Jamie Brown, a bunch of old photographs, a poster that says DON'T LOOK BACK, and a framed quote from a Jane Robert's book, something Seth wanted us to know: "We are all travelers, whatever our position, and as one traveler to another, I salute you."
At first, I thought that China might guide me into the interior regions of my being. I thought she might, in her own darkness, in her own journey, accompany me into mine. That, holding hands in the dark, we might comfort each other in our journey. That together, we might explore the shadows we live in, like the mesmerizing shadows in Krzyastof Kieslowski's beautiful film RED. I thought eventually we would come to a clearing and behold each other in full moonlight. Warts and all; beauty and all. That we might welcome the new morning together. Yet, strangely enough, I could not romanticize her, nor our situation. Nor could I dismiss the passion between us. So we stopped. Just like that.
Like a painting left undone.
§
from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times
(an unpublished novel)
This something-in-movement
Or,
CrazyMan Returns to Mother's Arms
1987-1995
§
Whenever you have an opportunity to laugh, laugh;
whenever you have an opportunity to dance, dance;
whenever you have an opportunity to sing, sing -
and one day you will find you have created your paradise.
Osho, 1931-1990
Every road leads to paradise
"Roundabouts," says the Centaur. "There is never any other way."
—James Branch Cabell, Jurgen
In the teachings of Coyote, life's journey doesn't travel in a straight line, but is circular, and so you can't leave parts of yourself 'behind.' "If you have a goal, a desire," Coyote says, "don't approach it directly. Approach in a circular movement. Circle your goal. See its darkness. See its light. See it all...." Henry Miller, I suppose, had something like these words in mind when, in his essay, "Reflections on Writing," he wrote: "Paradise is everywhere and every road, if one continues along it far enough, leads to it. One can only go forward by going backward and then sideways and then up and then down. There is no progress; there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it no matter where it leads him."
In 1987, my own destiny lead me to Grand Junction, Colorado. Seven years had passed since Naomi and I had split. Seven years of anger and silence and distance between us, and, for her, a daughter by the man she had left with. For me, seven years of reconstruction; seven years of dismantling old beliefs and false images and self-destructive ideas.
Every seven years, they say, we have a new skin, that all our skin cells have been renewed. For me, this renewal took place in my heart and mind and in the invisible world I live in, as well as in my skin.
Then one day, Naomi wrote me a letter.
She was living alone with her little girl in Colorado.
She wanted to see me.
I called Naomi from some place in Utah, about a hundred miles from Grand Junction. Before I reached the Colorado line, however, I stopped alongside the road and parked my car. I was still driving the 1978 Toyota wagon I had bought a few months after Naomi and I split up. I got out and climbed a tall hill that bordered the road. It was a beautifully clear night with an almost full moon. Living in the city, you can easily forget the night sky, the moon, the stars. For myself, it's like being without a woman for a long time. And when you find each other again, you and this woman, and she opens her arms to you and allows you inside her, in that moment you remember just how exquisitely alive everything is.
I quickly scanned the rocky ground. I reached down and picked up a small, brownish flat stone. I pressed the stone into my palm, storing in the rock my feelings and memories of this place and time. I put the stone in my pocket, got back into my car, and drove on to Grand Junction. I called Naomi again, this time from a pay phone just around the corner from where she was living.
She and her little girl, both barefooted, came running to meet me. I had never seen her little girl before. Alyssa was five years old.
Had Naomi ever looked so fine, so good to me?
We hugged each other on the sidewalk. I took her into my arms, her body warm and lean and sexy as ever in her tight blue jeans, her dark hair all curls tumbling over her forehead and around her shoulders. Naomi had such a pretty face. Such dark, warm, almond-shaped eyes and picture-perfect teeth and sweet, delicately curved lips. I had always loved her mouth. Even when Naomi snarled, she snarled like a wild, beautiful animal.
"I thought you'd get here tomorrow," she said, her statement more a question than a fact. Her voice sounded different from what I remembered when we were together. Not as soft, but plainer, more countrified. More like Colorado.
"I didn't stop much," I said, wondering if I had made a mistake, if I had rushed this meeting, if perhaps I should find some other place to stay for the night.
"No," she said. "I didn't mean it that way."
Then she smiled, looking down at the ground.
"Nice boots," she said.
I had on Apache style lace-up moccasins that came halfway to my knees. They were handmade from soft buffalo hide with six elk horn buttons. I had ordered them earlier in the summer from a boot maker at the Oregon County Fair.
Strange, how much anger Naomi had shown toward me all those years since we split up, and now she seemed so glad to see me, as if we had never quarreled, as if she had never spoken such bitter and humiliating words to me.
At the time, I did not understand her rage.
Sure, I had done stupid things. But nothing, I thought, to have such anger and blame, so much bitterness heaped upon me. Such loss of trust. Such disappointment.
Certainly I had disappointed her.
The child she wanted I did not give her. She must have felt my lack of total fire and enthusiasm, even as we went through all the steps we could possibly take.
Then, one day, she just gave up.
She piled all the baby clothes she had been saving and stuffed them in sacks and gave them to Goodwill. I probably lost her that day and I lost her again the night she went to another man, a friend of mine.
But most of all, I lost her because, as they say, once you break an egg, you can't put it back together again. And we broke the egg, the vulnerable seed called Our Marriage, the thin-shelled, idealized structure that surrounded us, both of us. We broke it deliberately, crazily, painfully.
Naomi liked marriage. She liked her role as a wife. I didn't understand roles. I didn't know the hidden rules. How things worked. I did know, however, that who you are and what you do must come from the center of your being.
But I played hide-and-seek with my heart.
I had no real intimacy with who I am. In fact, I can't recall ever using the word intimacy before my life with Naomi. She intuitively desired true intimacy. Yet, at the age of fourteen, she had been betrayed by a man, a friend of her mother's, and now she approached natural intimacy with suspicion and fear, while I approached with carelessness and fear. Time and time again, I betrayed the natural intimacy between us in small insensitive ways.
"A sticky ball of string," Mala, a spiritual seer, had called our marriage.
"Get a divorce," Mala had told us. That scared the hell out of Naomi. I just shrugged off Mala's warning. I couldn't admit my fear, not to Naomi, not even to myself. For I knew Mala was right. She didn't mean a legal divorce, she meant to undo the darkness between us. She meant for us to unwind the sticky strings, to trace them back to their source, to heal the ancient wounds we carried within us, that we might heal the wounds between us. She meant to open the windows to let clear, fresh air into the house.
; "You're choking yourself, David."
Mala told me that. And I knew it. I kept silent out of fear. Fear of Naomi's anger. Fear of her silent withdrawals. Fear of losing her. I could not talk about these feelings. I stuffed them, I swallowed them, I choked on them. I thought the passion between us—between Naomi and me—would make everything all right. I thought the fire between us—Oh, how warmly this fire did burn!—I thought this fire would end my great curiosity about women and put an end to my hunger and desire. My hunger for connection; my desire for wholeness. I thought this fire would burn away the dross of our everyday lives and transform the contents of our everyday lives. I thought the fire between us would burn until our bodies, together in dying, turned to ashes and then blazed even more brightly on the other side.
I thought the fire between us would never die.
Never.
"You want a cup of coffee?" Naomi asked me. "I have French Roast."
My favorite. "Sure."
I had not forgotten how good she was in the kitchen.
Nor would I ever forget that time in her kitchen, back in the summer of 1975, the morning we first became lovers. She was twenty-seven; I was thirty-three. I stood in her kitchen holding a tea kettle, my back to her, my hands shaking, wanting her so much that I couldn't even set the tea kettle on the burner to boil water. She slept upstairs with her husband Marcus; I slept alone downstairs.
The day before, in an old stuffed chair in her living room, we had kissed each other for the first time. We broke away and I walked outside. I walked down to the garden near the edge of the woods.
Funny how her kisses disappeared on my lips. They seemed not to leave any memory. I puzzled over this as I stood in Naomi's vegetable garden. I walked back to the house. I made a cup of tea. I mentioned this to Naomi. About her kisses. She understood; I didn't.
She had not kissed me with her whole heart.