by Cauble, Don
She knew that if she did, if she gave me her heart, she wouldn't turn back. She would leave her marriage. She knew she would hurt her husband terribly, her best friend for so many years, and mine since childhood. She knew she would be stepping out into the unknown. If she fell, would I be there to catch her?
It wasn't the breakup of my marriage to Angelina, coming on the heels of our return from living in Europe, but another woman who had acted as the bridge between Naomi and myself. A woman who put Naomi in such a jealous state that she threatened to burn all my writings on Greece and smash my typewriter.
"What's that slut got that I ain't got?" she raged at her husband at two in the morning. Marcus patiently reminded her that she had always acted this way toward my women. "That bastard runs his hand up her bathrobe right in front of me, I could kill him."
I had been friends with Anna Sylvan for a long time and when I first went to see her, not long after Angelina and I came back from Europe and split up our marriage, Anna was living in a rent-free house out in the country near Molalla, with her four-year-old daughter, a child from her off-again, on-again relationship with Eden Maldek. She and her daughter were raising rabbits to eat and sell. Actually, they had only five or six rabbits. But they had a goat. And the house didn't leak. It wasn't quite finished on the inside, but Anna had a double Virgo's touch when it came to delicacy and grace. The day I saw her, she was wearing faded jeans and a shirt unbuttoned at the top and a lavender headband around her auburn hair, which fell way down her back in cascades of light and shadow. With her dark, sad eyes, and her unpainted lips, soft as a primrose, Anna looked every bit a hippie princess in her long dresses and leather sandals and flowers in her hair. I knew that men couldn't resist her. I knew she drove Eden Maldek crazy, by disappearing for days without saying a word. That really didn't concern me. Something else concerned me. I could feel a wound of exquisite pain deep inside Anna. And I had no desire to bring any more pain to her.
The next time I saw Anna, it was July and the temperature was in the nineties. She had moved into Portland and was staying in the guest house that belonged to an old boyfriend of hers. I arrived in the middle of the day and Anna and her daughter were in bathing suits, sunning themselves by the swimming pool in back of the main house. I joined them in a swim.
Anna soon went to make lunch for us, and her daughter wanted me to play make-believe games with her. Monica had just gotten over the chicken pox. Except for Anna, she had been without company for days and she talked my ear off as she imagined adventures for us to act out.
We ate lunch and then Monica went down for a nap.
Toweling dry her long hair after a shower, Anna stood naked in front of the full-length mirror in her bathroom, the bathroom door causally open so that she could talk to me. She kept her voice low as she talked. I sat still as a mouse on her bed. As always, Anna's voice enchanted me. I hardly heard what she said, I felt so lulled by the smoky sound of her voice and her slow, lazy sensuality.
Without any fanfare Anna packed a few things into an overnight bag and went with me out to the country, taking Monica with her. Anna surprised me. Rather than fire, I felt softness. I seemed to sink forever and forever into her gorgeous, frightening softness. I was afraid I might lose myself in the sensuality of her body and in the softness of her voice, and that I might never find my way out.
Did my friend seem a little world weary?
"Nothing surprises me anymore," she said matter-of-factly.
I realized that she was feeling a little sore in places, too.
"I'm not used to all this lovemaking," she murmured.
Anna and her daughter stayed three days. Anna had a weeklong camping trip planned with some man, a friend, a lover, she didn't say. She had promised to go with him, and didn't want to break her promise.
I borrowed Naomi's car and drove Anna and her daughter back into Portland. A month passed before I heard from Anna again. By that time, everything had changed.
Three days now, and they were sleeping together in his bed and probably fucking all night, Naomi told herself, and David sure wasn't writing on his book. Anna had even less ambition than herself, if that was possible.
"That inconsiderate bastard!" she raged at Marcus. "He didn't bring my car back. Not that we needed it, but—."
Two days later, when Naomi told me all this, I was stunned. Why was she doing this? What did she want? A fire I had battled to keep down for years, suddenly flamed into new life. I remembered a dream I'd had while in jail in Greece. I had dreamed about Naomi the night after a letter came from her. It was the only letter I got from her during the two years I was in prison for growing hashish plants in a friend's garden. She didn't say much in her letter, but she did send me a bunch of color photographs of her and the house in the country that she and Marcus had bought. That night, in my dream, I saw continents come and go like clouds and simply vanish between Naomi and me. We passed through walls with our whole bodies. I reached out with my hands to touch her in the brightness of her being, to touch her heart.
"I thought you had forgotten me," she whispered. "I couldn't express my feelings, that's why I never wrote you. I dreamed of coming to you in prison. Oh, David, I was so afraid. Would I ever see you again? If you never came back, I couldn't live without not seeing you. I would come to you. I would!"
Later, a few days after our talk, Naomi wore short shorts and a skimpy blouse around the house, something I had never seen her do. She wasn't wearing a bra, either. Yet she acted so normal. As if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. I wanted to look the other way. I thought if I could look past her, or around her, but I couldn't focus on anything that wasn't her.
I knew Naomi didn't like to call attention to herself. When she worked at the bank as a loan officer, she wore dresses that were fashionably short and she looked delicious and sensual in them, yet she didn't care about looking sexy. She liked modest, comfortable clothes.
I had to get out of the house. I walked down past the vegetable garden. Behind a jungle of blackberry vines near the creek, I stripped off my clothes. I lay down on a bed of lush, green, unmowed grass. I lay there with (I figured), the biggest hard-on of my life. I imagined Naomi coming down to the creek looking for me and, miraculously, not turning back. I imagined her—. Ah, but who am I kidding? I would have been mortified if she had actually walked up on me.
The next day, alone together in the house, I put my arms around her. Without saying a word, we kissed each other for the first time.
Naomi had to decide for herself.
I could not tell her what to do. How could I? I did not know her mind. Nor her destiny. I knew she greatly valued fidelity, loyalty. I knew she valued marriage. I knew she loved her husband as a best buddy, even if the marriage between them had died. I knew also that she wanted me. I knew this, she knew this, and so did her husband.
So Destiny, like Coyote, kept circling us.
That morning, in her kitchen, the morning we first became lovers, Naomi watched me carefully. She saw me trembling as I fumbled with the tea kettle. She felt something inside her push her towards me. She walked over to the stove. She put her arms around me. She turned her face up to mine and kissed me. I felt her heart beating wildly yes...yes.
I reached down under her knees with one arm, a little clumsily, and lifted her into my arms. She closed her eyes. She held onto my neck as I carried her into my room.
*****
At first, in our marriage, I think Naomi felt some competition with me in the kitchen. The kitchen belonged to her. Gradually, I stopped cooking altogether. I worked my day job as camera operator at the print shop; she stayed at home and took care of Scotty, her adopted son with Marcus, and opened a day-care center. We bought a two-story white house in North Portland near Kenton Park. A corner house. Next to our house stood its twin. Both houses had been built in 1910 by two brothers. In our house, the original woodwork had not been painted over—as the woodwork in so many older homes in Portland has been—and we
had leaded windows and a fireplace. (Naomi, I don't think, would ever want to live in a house that didn't have a fireplace.) A wooden front porch and railing ran the full length of the west side. Huge horse chestnut trees lined both sidewalks.
With Naomi as architect and chief carpenter, we built a white picket fence around our small, mostly shaded backyard. I put in a tiny lawn for Scotty to play on, and we grew our vegetables in a community garden. We had carpet installed in the living and dining rooms (the floors weren't hardwood), and Naomi set in to remodeling the kitchen. Day after day in the summertime, she worked long hours preserving peaches and strawberries and green beans and corn. (The best way to get rid of a million fruit flies, I found out, is to use a vacuum cleaner.)
Naomi wanted a dog, and so we got a little Boston Terrier named Betty Boop. Boopsie loved everyone, and without a second thought, she would trot off down the sidewalk after a stranger. We only had her for a short time. She escaped the backyard one evening and got killed by a car, even as I was working on the picket fence to make it higher, so that she couldn't scramble over it.
Naomi loved to go camping. She loved to travel, sleep in a tent, cook outdoors. We took camping trips to the Oregon coast and to Crater Lake. The Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California became our favorite vacation spot. As you can see, a traditional marriage gradually formed around us. The full catastrophe, as Zobra called it.
And then, as if overnight, everything came undone. In Grand Junction, in Naomi's tiny kitchen, we had coffee together for the first time in seven years. Later, after Alyssa had gone to bed in her own bedroom, we talked until two.
"You want me to sleep on the couch or outside?" I asked. By outside, I meant the small mobile home parked in back. The mobile home belonged to her mother. Her mother lived a few miles away on a ranch with one of Naomi's brothers.
"What do you want?" Naomi asked.
"I'd rather sleep here."
She disappeared into her bedroom and I rolled out my sleeping bag on the couch. I crawled into my bag just as she came back into the room. She had changed from her shirt and jeans into a thin nightgown.
"I'm not sleepy," she said.
She sat down in the ragged, overstuffed chair next to the couch and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them. Strange, how relaxed and safe I felt with her. I couldn't feel a trace of her old anger, not a hint of blame. We didn't even talk about it.
In the letter Naomi sent me, she had written about going to Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents. Her anger, she realized, had little to do with me. She wanted to acknowledge this. And she had been thinking of a Seth book by Jane Roberts she knew I had. She wanted to read the book. I called her on the phone and we talked for a long time. I made plans to go to Colorado. She wrote me another letter. She told me about a dream she had. She dreamed of a stream of light entering her and she knew that this stream of light was me. I did not tell Naomi, but I knew her dream had been more than a dream. At least, more than an ordinary dream. I didn't want to tell her for I was afraid she might get scared. Then she called me on the phone and said she had decided to move back to Portland at the end of September, which was three weeks away. But I didn't want to wait. I wanted to see her in Colorado.
We looked at each other. She smiled.
I had changed, she had changed. All the way to Colorado, I couldn't help but wonder, What if? I would not know until the moment we saw each other. I knew how easily one moment goes into its opposite. One moment you're a hero, the next a goat.
Desire flickers this way, that way.
I knew Naomi did not easily change her feelings. Casual sex? Forget it. Naomi belonged to the earth, to trees, to rocks, to home and hearth. She could build a fence, a wall, a home. She loved fires, and between us, I realized, the fire had not died, not yet.
God, how much I wanted her. As I had always wanted her. How long ago since that night in San Francisco? Almost twenty years. Almost that night we had crossed the line. Before Angelina. Before Greece. Before prison.
I got out of my sleeping bag.
I moved over to her chair.
She looked at me, her eyes unwavering.
I raised the edge of her nightgown. She opened her legs slightly. I tasted her. Moist. Yummy and sweet. Of all women, Naomi tasted the sweetest.
She took me by the hand and I followed her.
Epilogue
David and Naomi's second time around didn't last long.
Naomi returned to Portland with Alyssa and rented a house in SE Portland. Naomi claimed that Eden came to the house only to see their daughter. She wasn't, she claimed, having sex with Eden. David quickly found out that wasn't true.
Without trust, once more, their lives went separate ways.
Paradise lay farther down the road.
Much farther, as David found out.
Years later, after all the debris from the wreckage of their marriage had floated downstream, once more they could acknowledge the deep love they felt for each. Not as romance, but as an abiding spiritual connection crossing over many lifetimes. Naomi was now happily married. Alyssa had grown into a young woman. Scotty traveled back and forth between Portland and Alaska. Marcus and Carolyn now lived in the South. After David and Alora split up, during the time of the "harmonic convergence," he bought a house, then lived alone for the next fifteen years and tended the cottage garden he had so lovingly created. Then he met the woman he would spend the rest of his life with, whatever that might bring, wherever that might take them.
§
from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times
(an unpublished novel)
This something-in-movement
To reach into the fire,
To bring the burning into words;
To enter the darkness,
To remember—
David Pendarus
—"The Burning"
You came to me
through a handful of light,
a mere cluster of stars—
like soft yellow flowers
in a room of white.
You called to me
and I answered your call;
or was it I
who called to you?
I remember a desert,
a great burning distance,
a caravan of illusions
passing like rain between us;
and I remember mountains, bitter
as the betrayal of a brother,
not knowing if I would ever see you
or if I was simply dreaming;
and I remember walking in the ruins
of great cities,
down streets diseased, overrun
with neglect and the crying
of children.
And they say I went crazy,
that I cursed the Mother
Of All Living Things;
that I tore out my heart
and made war on the Earth.
And they say that you built a great wall
out of fear, out of anger and jealousy,
high as a cathedral around you,
and that you never came out,
a long time ago.
*****
It was such a cold winter I remember. At times,
the chill numbed me to its destructiveness; mostly
though, it caused pain, sharp and biting. I lost
several fingers to frostbite, and a toe as well.
And the storm froze one dear one to death.
Even now it brings me pain and fear, the memory
does. No way would I ever choose to live through,
or even try to survive, such a lonesome freeze ever again.
But you remind me that these are memories,
real enough to grip my bones and make me shiver.
Yet merely memories, nonetheless.
To tell my story, though, helps me, my brother.
The elders know this. Their storytelling is for
instruction, a passing on of wisdom.
However, it is
also so clearly a means to validate their experiences
and a way to make sense of the pain.
Those fierce and unpredictable winds burned my
face and rubbed my soul raw. The winter was real
with a vengeance.
And now here, by the fire with you, the telling
of my tale softens the sorrow, begins to heal
the cold knifelike pain that lingers within me.
*****
But most of all,
I remember how you turned to me,
in a garden called choice,
the light dancing around us,
and not even the meadow grasses
in fields of white clouds,
or even the thoughts of angels,
could know such tenderness as the love
we felt between us,
our hearts one with all that is,
and we made this covenant,
each to each—
before the beginning,
before sorrow and pain and self-doubt;
before our journey into loss and separation—
a sacred pledge
that we would never forget,
that not even ten thousand deaths
or all the darkness in the world
could overshadow: this
moment:
this love:
this something-in-movement
that calls me to you.
Grace & grit
A time too soon,
I shall not walk this lovely green earth
again, nor see the radiant sun break,
nor feel the breeze sudden spring blows
across my face; nor touch once more
this woman whom I have loved;
this woman whose eyes dazed mine
with brightness, whose glance nestled
my heart in folds of sleepless love.
—David Pendarus, A Time Too Soon
Years ago, we had been lovers and now she was dying. She was dying of cancer. I had not seen Aditi in months, and, when an invitation came to a Christmas party at her house, I made plans to go. From Merika, I learned that Aditi had moved in with a woman named Viola. Viola, I gathered, was an artist, a painter, but I had never met her. During this 1993 Christmas season, Aditi played more than thirty performances of the Nutcracker Suite for the Seattle Symphony. Aditi played the bass. At one time, she had been rated among the top ten bass players in the United States. That was before she stopped playing, before she went to India, before she gave up everything to become a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.