by Marco Vassi
She had refused, at that time, to discuss it further.
The waiter glided up and waited silently by their table, exuding a pressure for them to respond to his presence. Fred looked over at Lydia questioningly. She squinted, pursed her lips in thought, and then very sweetly said, “I’ll just have a cheeseburger.” Then, turning to the waiter, added, “With a slice of raw onion. And please bring a bottle of catsup.”
Fred grimaced but said nothing.
“How’s the veal today, Arthur?” he asked.
“Quite good, sir,” the waiter replied, dancing in his composure.
“As good as the cheeseburger, Arthur?” Lydia asked in a mincing tone.
“Please, Lydia,” Fred said.
She looked down.
“You’re quite right,” she said. “I’m sorry.” There was no point in being unkind to the waiter.
“Bring me the veal,” Fred went on, “And bring the lady a cheeseburger.” The waiter and Fred exchanged a fragment of a glance, the implicit male awareness that it was often necessary to treat women as though they were rational creatures capable of understanding language but that that should never lull a man into thinking that he was faced with anything more remarkable than an alien creature which had learned to mimic human speech.
“One veal and one hamburger au fromage,” the waiter repeated.
Lydia and Fred sat in silence for a minute, sipping their drinks. He was dressed in a three piece suit. Lydia had on the slacks and blouse that had become almost a uniform with her. Her hair was slightly tousled and she wore no makeup. They made an odd pair, and only the conditioned politeness of the people who frequented the place kept them from being stared at.
“You know that this place is utterly absurd, don’t you,” Lydia said.
“That’s precisely why I brought you here. I thought your sense of the absurd needed some sharpening. I thought it might give you some perspective.”
“On what?” Lydia asked. “For the first time in my life I feel that I am acting like an adult, taking responsibility for my own actions and thoughts and feelings. And maybe what I’m doing is a mistake. And if you would, you might give me feedback to help me. But to dismiss my entire work as wrong is the grossest oversimplification, and you know it.”
As Fred watched her, a slow heat began to spread through his chest. Her eyes were flashing and her mouth curling in anger; her excitement aroused all the latent lust that he’d been putting on the shelf for the month he’d forced himself to stay away from her. He x-rayed her as she sat, and realized that he knew every pore of her body, from her pale pink nipples to the crispy turn of her pubic hair. There was hardly a thing they had not done together, and he could, if he concentrated, recall the pungent taste of her cunt’s secretions, the musky smell of her asshole, the deep sandalwood aroma of her armpits. He had seen her on her knees sucking his cock, on her belly with his prick in her ass, lying across a bed as he plunged again and again into the marshmallow melting of her yielding snatch. They had kissed and stroked and pinched and fondled one another for hundreds of hours. And talked and laughed and explored the recesses of the city’s collective psyche in its museums and bars and theatres and clubs. For an instant, he saw that they had been courting a long time, and now wondered why the thought of marriage had never occurred to him.
“Because it’s climbing that damned cliff,” he thought. “Tied to one another with a rope, exhilarated up the first easy slopes, ecstatic when the first dangerous shelves are passed, bored during the long monotonous stretches. And then there always comes that instant when you’ve worked your way up the face of a sheer rock face. Half way up, you realize that you may not make it. And there’s no turning back. And you wonder how in the hell you ever got there. But it’s too late. There’s no way out of marriage except divorce or death. The price of being born is dying, but no one has a choice about whether they want to start the life trip. The price of marriage is taking on another life form which has to suffer its own death. But in that case there is a choice.”
“What are you thinking?” Lydia asked, breaking into his reverie.
He smiled. “I was thinking that there are much better uses for a mouth like yours than spouting platitudes.”
For a second she was angry, and then remembered the reference. It was the first thing he’d ever said to her. A flash of fondness ran through her and she felt the impulse to run her fingers through his hair and pull his head to her breasts. It was only then that she saw how far she had progressed in the previous few months. Fred had been a man who could make her squirm with uncertainty, and now he appeared as little more than a charming boy, the product of his empty way of life.
She reached across the table and took his hands in hers.
“Look,” she said, “what I’m doing is no longer in my control. I don’t want to sound like a revivalist about it, but I really believe that I have plugged into forces that are greater than ours, than those ordinarily available to human beings. I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a fanatic, but my only commitment is to truth. It has always been that, of course, but in the past I wasn’t so sharply aware that living by the truth requires immense courage and risk. I’m through with being concerned about earning a living, or maintaining a reputation, or building a career. I only care about discovering what is true. And this impulse began with Marsha’s suicide, with the sudden understanding that reality is more than what we are told by our scientists and philosophers. It’s greater than anything the human mind can imagine. I guess I’ve always had that in the back of my mind or I wouldn’t have become a therapist. And I suppose that the message of the psychedelic teachers and the gurus is the same, only I have been too immersed in my theoretical structures to hear it. But I’ve found my own way now. And you were one of the people who gave me the important clues. In many ways, I wouldn’t be here now without you. So I don’t really understand why you have become so negative about my work.”
“Because I think it’s taking you someplace that is potentially fatal. When I spoke to you about fantasy, I meant that you should change your inner attitude, alter your way of seeing things, get looser about your approach. Reality goes on without us, you know. The great swings of the galaxies, the shifts of the continents, the sweep of evolution, the birth and death of the sun, and even the convolutions of history all are vast schemes that are beyond our control. My argument with you is that you got stuck at that level and let it wear you. down. I simply wanted you to look at creation the way a child looks at a toy. And to step into a state of awareness which floated over all that terrible, implacable reality which the culture defines for us. Do you understand? Fantasy is the way to beat the reality game, but you’re perverting that. You’re trying to infuse fantasy into reality to change what is. And that’s a form of pride, as well as a futile exercise.”
Fred was surprised to find himself breathing hard. He had become carried away by his impassioned appeal and he was aware that his voice had carried to the rest of the restaurant. He was not even sure that his words made sense. Terms like fantasy and reality were so slippery, forming as they did the ground upon which all other definitions were based. But that ground was drenched with Marsha Seligson’s blood and Marsha couldn’t stand easily on it. Fred felt secure about his own position but he was thrown off balance trying to hold Lydia up. She continued to show a seemingly obtuse unwillingness to see the difference between fantasy and myth, and between myth and reality, and had come to a muddled synthesis in which she was somehow equating fantasy and reality.
He settled back in his seat and lit a cigarette, his hands sliding out of Lydia’s grasp. The murmur of the huge fountain which sat in the center of the restaurant washed over him and soothed his vibrations. And in a few moments, the waiter returned, wheeling a large chrome cart loaded with covered dishes. He sailed up to their table and halted, and then with practiced gestures uncovered each of the plates and slid
them onto the table. Lydia looked down at a white and blue bone china dish which held a tiny hamburger. She glanced up at the waiter.
“I asked for a cheeseburger,” she said.
“The fromage, Madame, is inside the burger,” the man said in clipped tones.
Lydia frowned to keep from giggling.
The waiter finished placing the side dishes of vegetables on the table and rolled away, his cart squeaking slightly.
“Oh, it’s so ridiculous,” Lydia said when the man was out of earshot. “This whole scene can’t be real.”
“Come on,” Fred cajoled. “It’s just a middle-brow restaurant with pretensions. Don’t tell me that it’s really upsetting you.”
“Oh, not just the restaurant. The whole thing. The city, the civilization. It’s so stilted. I mean, that waiter, all those people there eating like well-programmed robots, are no different than the people I see in my office.”
She leaned forward, her body stiff with excitement. “Don’t you understand?” she began, using the very phrase that Fred and Doctor Monroe had so often stopped her with, “I have entered a different state of perception. When I look at people, it’s not just their clothes or their body postures or their identities that I see. I look into their very hearts and minds, and perceive the fantasies, the desires, the ability to drop all the conditioned states and emerge as free beings. Nothing in this society impresses me any more. It’s all moribund, miserable. And a place like this restaurant is the worst of all, so far removed from anything truly human and alive that I don’t see how it can exist at all.”
“Oh God,” Fred exploded, “you’re getting just like every other utopian crank I’ve ever met. You sit in the middle of the most powerful city in the world, fed by the totality of the entire civilization’s technology and resources, and you go into this whining number about how meaningless it all is. What do you think you’re gathering around you but a bunch of overfed, super-saturated neurotics who are happy to jump at the chance for orgies and sensitivity sessions and fantasy acting-out? It’s the kind of crowd you get in response to a Voice ad, hangers-on and losers who haven’t got enough of a center to create a life for themselves. The whole situation is putrid. I remember one group therapy session I attended years ago before I got to know better. Some dismal woman was on the hot-spot with everyone firing questions at her and demanding that she be ‘real’. And finally she seemed at the edge of saying something but couldn’t get it out. And they harped at her until she yelled, “All right. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking: would any of us be here if we had anything at all more interesting to do tonight?’ And that’s it in a nutshell. Urban ghosts haunting the night looking for some form of life and finding nothing but ghouls like themselves.”
To Fred’s astonishment, when he looked over at Lydia, tears were trickling from the corners of her eyes. He was taken aback.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, what is it?”
“I was thinking of Marsha,” she told him, “who finally found a way out of her misery. And of all the others, who slide into lives of unhappiness at low boil, who become greyer and more cynical and deadly and who die without ever having lived. And I don’t care what you say, someone has to do something, no matter how crazy, no matter how feeble, no matter how neurotic it seems. Because we can’t keep going the way we’re going, living in this . . . this . . . “
Lydia stood up and raised her arms to take in the entire restaurant, with its fountain and carpets and polished furniture and expensive food and waiters in tuxedos. And at the top of her lungs, she finished her sentence.
“In this SHIT!” she yelled, causing forks to drop and heads to turn and officious types to begin walking toward her.
But she turned rapidly and strode out of the room looking neither to the right nor left.
Fred stared at her for a few seconds and then jumped to his feet and ran after her, their food still sitting on the table. As he passed Arthur he pressed four twenty dollar bills into his hand and rushed on. Lydia was already on the street by the time he reached the door. She was moving very quickly, and he almost lost her in the crowd.
“Lydia,” he shouted, “Lydia, wait.”
He caught up to her on Lexington Avenue and took her arm from behind.
“Please, Fred,” she said, stopping and turning to face him, “I don’t want to fight with you. I just think that I’ve moved into a different world than yours and I don’t see that we have anything in common any more.”
“Lydia, this is insane. We’ve known each other for more than two years. We’ve made love a thousand times. We are in love.”
As he said the last words, they looked into one another’s eyes, sharing a glance that set them to rocking on their heels.
“Yes,” Lydia told him, “I do love you. But that means something far different to me than it once did. Love for me used to mean tension, the struggle between my autonomy and the man’s will. Now it means sharing, the ability to enter a common space together. I have a purpose now. I don’t exist as a reflection or an extension of a man. I’m my own woman. And I have my own destiny and vision to fulfill.”
Around them the traffic belched and ground its gears and honked, the thousands of cars and busses and cabs transforming their drivers into slaves of the machinery, and reducing the hundreds of thousands of people who walked the streets into mere obstructions to the flow of metal. Men and women rushed past them, hurried, harried, clutching bags and briefcases. It was controlled pandemonium, the ultimate in focused anarchy, the city a great center where millions pursued separate goals in the context of a ruling abstraction called progress.
Fred held Lydia by the arms. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He didn’t recognize himself.
“I want you to marry me,” he said.
She did not reply for a long while. They stood so still that even the ordinarily tunnel-visioned passersby glanced at them, some wondering if this were a scene from a movie and casting about to see where the cameras were. Lydia was breathing heavily. What Fred had just asked were words which, if she’d heard them three months earlier, would have transported her into a heady euphoria. But now they sounded like a declaration made in a foreign language. She simply didn’t understand them. They were totally outside her current context. After having plunged with her newly formed family into waters of oceanic eroticism and multi-dimensional interaction, this offer made as much sense as giving a stale biscuit to a woman who’d been feasting on fruit and nuts.
“I’m afraid,” she said slowly, “that I couldn’t even think of something like that with anyone who is outside our group.”
“What!?” he replied. “Outside your group!”
“Why, yes,” she said simply.
“God, you sound like some idiot fanatic. Don’t you see what’s happened to you? You’ve committed the classic mistake, you’ve divided the world into us and them, the grisly beginning of all crusades.”
Lydia shook her head slowly.
“You’re responding to the words,” she said. “What’s really happening is that I am forming a family, a real family. Call it a tribe if you will. But I’ve found something that I can only call a religion. Not the tired old orthodoxy, but a real connection, something with actual juice in it, something that gives meaning to my life and the lives of those who have decided to join with me. And that’s my primary responsibility, to the group that has learned to share its fantasy life, to make its most secret and cherished dreams come true.”
“Come true how? Where? You’re nothing but parasites, just like the rest of us. Living off the surplus of civilization, enjoying its benefits, and then putting down its substance. What makes you think you’re so special? How are you different than anyone else? There are forty million housewives who turn on their TV. screens and enter into an electronic communion far more pervasive than anything you could even imagine. And you crawl around a dark ro
om and grope one another and give it a fancy name. Lydia, please, you’re more intelligent than that.”
“Or is it that you just can’t stand the idea of me groping anyone else, or anyone else enjoying my body?”
He glanced down at his shoes. Lydia felt a mixture of scorn and tenderness for him.
“Maybe you’re right,” she told him. “But I can’t help but see you as anything but an outsider. Everything you’re saying is destructive. You’re not telling me anything positive. Don’t you think we’re sophisticated enough to see ourselves in the light you portray us? But so what? What is our alternative? Back to the routine, off to work, and the dictates of the culture and then nodding out in front of the tube? I don’t want to put down the way you earn a living, but please don’t become an apologist for a dumb way of life.”
Fred stepped back from her. There was something of the old confidence on his face. He grabbed onto the handle that he had been looking for, the way to attain the position of dominance. It was not that he wanted to force Lydia into a submission so much as needing to have the more comprehensive expression. It did not even matter to him whether what he said were judged more complete or profound by her or anyone else, so long as he could rest in his own estimation of his words.
“All right,” he said. “If you’re serious, you have to get out of the city. You have to go somewhere and be totally self sufficient. You have to grow your own food, heal your own sick, bury your own dead. You have to get out of Egypt and go find your promised land. And if you can do that, without getting ingrown and convoluted, then maybe you’ll have some justification for thinking that your way has produced a real change in the human condition. But so long as you remain here, living the parasitic existence the rest of us wallow in, then you’re not doing anything but jerking off.”
She put her hands on his shoulders. “Fred, will you come with me . . . with us?”
“Huh?”
“Come to one of our groups. Meet the others. Join the fantasy work. Get naked with us. Live with us. We really need someone like you, someone with your mind and even, yes, your cynicism. You could be so valuable. And we could be together. That might be a real marriage.”