by Denise Roig
The truth was that between the personalities — far larger in this desert resort than they’d ever seemed in Sondra’s Santa Monica bungalow — and my pounding head, there was barely the psychic space to write. I’d tried the usual warm-up that afternoon: a list of verbs tumbling fast from the subconscious. Take three and start writing. This always kick-started me in the city.
But here it just looked like a list of verbs: gyrate, pump, explode, run, gambol, quake, hypnotize, bury. And then for some reason: pranam. A leftover maybe from my meditating, Hindu-guru days, when I would lie face down, full body to the floor, at the feet of the master. Pranam. Oookay. Then in free-association free fall: pester, land, infiltrate, stun. Usually I enjoyed spying on my inner self this way, was entertained by the hairpin turns of my mind as I jumped from verb to verb. But that afternoon at Casa Polarity, I just thought: mixed-up girl.
“Do we know who runs this place?” Joe asked as we staked out our places on the floor. Most of us had arrived by noon, in time for the Casa’s vigorous lunch of organic produce. “I mean, do we know?” The lack of caffeine was making him paranoid.
“Not Starbucks,” said Mary Anne.
“Did you see the women?”Allison asked. “They look like the Stepford Wives. Those shining eyes, as if they’ve seen the light.”
“Did you read the brochure, for chrissake?” said Candace. “‘We would appreciate no sexual relations being conducted on our premises outside of marriage.’ Where do they get off? And who says ‘relations’ anymore?”
“Who has relations anymore?” asked Joe.
“Hey, guy, speak for yourself,” said Curtis, the newest guy in the group.
“And these buildings, like relics from some Hollywood set,” I offered.
“Let’s take the plunge, shall we?” said Sondra.
Usually we start out, not exactly meditating, but sitting in a circle together. Grounding, Sondra calls it. Candace — who often puts herself in the position of translating Sondra to the rest of us, with no objection from Sondra, who doesn’t mind being seen as a bit inscrutable — calls it Centering. I call it breathing. I follow the breath of the people, friends all, around me.
It was the chance to be with these folks for three days and really write, plus getting out of the smog and not having to think about what Coleman was doing right then and with whom in New York, that finally convinced me I could afford $500, all-inclusive, plus (apparently) the opportunity to kick caffeine if that was something one was concerned about. I’d taken a cash advance on my Visa. Last time, I’d told myself at the ATM earlier in the week. How it would actually be the last time, and how real, regular, actual money was going to start coming in, I didn’t know. But a few days in the desert might clear the way. Both Sondra and Candace had said so to me separately.
“It’ll come,” Candace had said in that dead-sure, positive way of hers that really does see me through a lot.
“Balance and opportunity, Jennifer,” Sondra had said. I decoded that to mean: If you come on this retreat, everything will work out. The money, the man, the screenplay. All in their time and all in perfect balance, and all before I turned forty, six months away. As she reminded me not so cryptically, “The place is called Polarity.”
Sondra’s head was rolling left to right, right to left, the way it does sometimes when we centre ourselves. I closed my eyes, the better to feel my own sensations. My neck was stiff, my head like a pincushion. I imagined a mug of coffee before me; it steamed; my temple thumped. I opened my eyes and saw Joe and Mary Anne leaning into each other, whispering. Mary Anne smiled. She saw me looking, and smiled more. I pointed to my head, winced. Mary Anne put a trigger to hers.
“Empty the day, empty the past,” Sondra was saying. And I knew she knew we were being our unfocused selves.
“You’re so talented and so unfocused,” Sondra had told Mary Anne in front of the whole group a few months before.
Afterward — Mary Anne and Joe and I live in the neighbourhood and usually walk home together after writing group — Mary Anne had said, “Gifted but lacks focus. Story of my life.”
“Mary Anne could have been an astro…what was it, M.A.? An astrophysicist?” Joe asked. The three of us had linked our arms; Joe was in the middle. It was nearly 1:30. Sondra liked to wear us down, let fatigue open all the valves. Usually we were still writing at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. “She had a scholarship to MIT when she was a pup,” Joe said.
I’d looked over at Mary Anne, all ninety-four pounds of her. Her blonde bangs had gotten long, dipped into her eyes.
“Class valedictorian. Honours physics. Prez of the science club,” Joe said.
Mary Anne shrugged. “But noooo, I thought I’d write comedy.”
“You’re funny,” said Joe. “Your stuff is really, really funny.” But Mary Anne pushed off from us, and Joe and I had walked the rest of the way home behind her.
Sondra was now invoking the spirits of the desert. “Watch over us this weekend,” she said. “Guide our pens. Guide our hearts.” Then she split us into groups for our first writing exercise. We were seven — Candace, me, Joe, Mary Anne, Curtis, plus Gabriella and Allison — so that meant one group would have three. Sondra always tried to split up Mary Anne and Joe, because although they weren’t a couple, they were best friends and former roommates. And Sondra, though she didn’t exactly have it in for Mary Anne, didn’t like to make it too easy for her either.
After closing her eyes for a full minute, she divided us: Mary Anne and Curtis, Joe and Candace (Candace immediately going into, “There was a cool guy named Joe, who…”), and me with Gabriella and Allison, though those two were a couple and Sondra seemed to have no problem with their working together.
I was happy. My teammates were solid, funny, good folks. “How’s Coleman making out?” Allison asked when we got into groups, even though we were supposed to be getting right into High Dive, the first exercise. “How’s the Rotten Apple treating him? Are they past previews yet?”
No idea, I told her. “We talked a few times the first week he was there and then he moved and now I don’t have a number for him and…” I had to stop. High dive right into a vat of tears. I’d been crying a lot in the last month. It wasn’t just Coleman, though he didn’t help.
“Things have always been pretty loose between us,” I said. “Now they’re baggy.”
“Don’t worry, honeybunch, he’ll call,” said Allison. “He’s just getting acclimated. New York takes a lot out of people.”
“She’s giving us the eye,” Gabriella said.
We took the plunge.
Griffin found he couldn’t swim all that well. (So literal — high dive, water. Jeez.) And now, of course, it was too late, with the azure light pouring through and Nippy’s goggles filling up with water. (Who’s Nippy?) A failure of preparation, as usual. A failure to look ahead and realize that there could be bogs and snags, treacherous sand. Nippy, thought Griffin, as he dropped and eddied near a high wall of coral, was someone who always could see weeks in front of him. Years even. Life never surprised him, whereas it was only surprises for Griffin. (Who’s Griffin?)
Joe and Mary Anne, though they weren’t in the same group, had managed to stretch out next to each other. Joe wasn’t writing, was watching Mary Anne who was writing furiously as usual. He read along, nodding.
Talk about baggy relationships. Joe was straight as far as I knew. There was love there and knowledge and no bullshit. “Romance means bullshit,” Mary Anne said when I’d tried to delicately inquire once. “He wants to sometimes, but no, we know each other way too well.” Mary Anne looked up now at Joe and made a dramatic move with her arm so he was shut out. Mary Anne did this exercise better than anybody, as if she packed all the force of her small body and huge mind into the spring-off, hit bottom immediately, then fluttered her way up to air. We would be gasping for breath sometimes, the writing was that brilliant. “Boy, does that resonate!” Candace would say when Mary Anne read a page to us afterward. And Sondra would j
ust nod and ask, “Anyone else?”
But Nippy had done this one too many times. Gone off and left Griffin with just enough instructions to nearly kill himself. Like the time he’d typed up the directions to the Ski-Doo. Typed! Lots of detail on how long to idle, which lever was for what (are there levers on snowmobiles? Veracity, veracity) and anal points about wiping the thing down afterward and how to store it. No opportunity, though, for questions. Of course, Nippy was a law unto himself. A golden-eyed fish was coming directly at him. Griffin saw a flash of white and wondered, Do fish have teeth?
I was treading water. Maybe if I started over, went with just dialogue. Or did a quick verb to verb. Anything that didn’t stick me with loser characters in a situation I knew zip about, like deep-sea diving. Although the goggles filling up with water sounded like maybe he was only scuba diving. What did I know? But Sondra was strict about a few things, one being that you rode things out, that you wrote and waited and trusted.
“Fuck trust,” Mary Anne said one night on the way home. “What does she think we are, idiots? If something’s dying on the page, get out and cook something else.”
Griffin breathed in and watched the bubbles swirl over his head. It was another world down here, just like Nippy said. The colours so intense, the silence so loud. It was enough to make him forget. Almost. (Time for revelation: They’re a gay couple. No, they’re boarding school enemies. No, they’re just jerks.)
Candace was weeping silently. This happened to her sometimes, actually pretty often, when she wrote. She couldn’t help it, she said. Ever since Sondra had strongly suggested that Candace go back and look at her precognition images and leave the writing of fiction “for later,” Candace had been undergoing a rebirthing of sorts. She wiped her eyes with the wrists of her sweatshirt, the one I’d given her for her birthday the year before and which she wore nearly every time we were together. I looked at her long enough and hard enough for her to raise her head and smile at me through the downfall. She was right about our connection being strong. It was just that I didn’t feel that way about her.
Choke, float, decry, imitate, infiltrate, boggle, tease. Verbs galore. I didn’t care. I already hated Griffin and Sabine or whatever his name was. Wait. I turned back the page and saw that infiltrate was on my earlier verb list. Did this mean something? Sondra said there was significance in every little thing.
Griffin: I don’t know why you just don’t go down with me. I mean you’re the one with the experience.
Nippy: The first time should always be solo.
Griffin: Says who, ol’ buddy ? I’m scared shitless.
Nippy: But being scared is the best part. I wish I was still scared. I’d give anything to still be scared.
I’d been telling Sondra for a year that I should be writing screenplays, not short stories, but she said that if I couldn’t tell a story in actual story form, in traditional, dead white novelists’ narrative, then I’d never be able to do it as a script. “And besides, do you want to be like every other person in this city, pounding out the Great American Screenplay?” she asked. (Joe, Mary Anne and I dubbed it The GAS.) “Do something original! Do something not L.A.!”
Of course, that’s not what she’d been telling Curtis, who’d arrived six months before with a novel half done. “Put it away,” she told him. Now he was finishing the pilot script for a TV melodrama because she said the dialogue in his novel was “inauthentic.” Now he was writing nothing but dialogue.
Sondra put people in the washer, added a whole lot of bleach, and hit “spin.” What makes me different from other writing teachers, she said to new people coming in, is that I don’t meet you where you are. You think you’re the next Raymond Carver? I’ll have you write song lyrics for a while. You’ve spent the last year working on a screenplay? Time to write personal essays. Or the libretto for an opera. Or maybe just a year’s worth of journal entries. The idea was that every form fed every other form. A new one freed you from the one you were committed to, and, Sondra said, were more often throttled by. Her other idea was that we all thought too much, that we had to reconnect to our deeper source. (Everyone has one, she assured us in the New Age-guru tone she alternated with haute-literary critic and showbiz been-around. Sondra, as Griffin might say, was a law unto herself.) The point of High Dive and Evening Papers and Verb to Verb, even all our synchronized breathing, was to meet up with that source. “Unbridle yourselves!” she entreated us. (Every time Sondra said this, Mary Anne gave a soft whinny, just loud enough for Joe and me to hear.) Of course, all that unbridling and genre-swapping made for a certain level of weirdness every Tuesday night.
“Are you bored?” Sondra once demanded of Mary Anne, who’d complained, saying she wanted to get back to writing comedy.
“Well, no,” Mary Anne whined.
“Are you writing?”
“Well, yeah. Poetry.”
“Are you learning anything?”
Mary Anne had shrugged, then nodded.
“It’s a long, lovely, ride,” Sondra said.
“Lonely, too,” said Joe.
“That’s why we have each other,” Sondra said.
Sondra was writing now herself, lying on her side, elbow resting on her sculpted hip (she did Pilates every day), her many-shades-of-blonde hair falling from its trademark French roll. She always wrote, although she never read her stuff out loud. Mary Anne thought she was writing lists — groceries, things to take to the cleaners — but Allison said, no, Sondra had been working on a novel for the past few years, even had some New York agents interested in it. Something about child pornography, something headline-ish.
“OK, mes amis,” said Sondra. “Time out.”
I was glad because Nippy, Griffin and I, we were 20,000 leagues under the sea.
Outside, Joe, Curtis, Mary Anne, and I breathed in the night air. And Joe’s cigarette, though we’d been strictly forbidden in Casa Polarity’s brochure.
“Get me some fucking java,” Curtis said. He was one of those guys who said fuck almost as much as he said I or me, which was a lot, too.
“I could make a run into town,” said Joe, his voice so low, I had to lean in to hear him. The movement made my head hurt worse.
“The ginseng-mint-zinger tea ain’t doing it for you, baby ?” Mary Anne asked, but Joe didn’t laugh.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. I wanted something to do, somewhere to go. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine how I was going to last out there for two whole days.
“There is no town,” Mary Anne reminded us.
“We’re about mid-point, I figure, between L.A. and San Diego,” said Curtis, who was new to SoCal. “I’d love to go clear to San Diego, put in a visit at the zoo, pull an all-nighter. There and back. She’d never fucking know.”
I wasn’t sure about Curtis. He was too quick to climb on board, to claim things he hadn’t earned yet, like an attitude toward Sondra. Not that he ever showed that kind of sass around her. What really turned my stomach, though, was how she was with him. She got fluttery and buttery. He was a looker with longish, sandy hair that curled adorably around his temples, eyes like Ralph Fiennes’, pale blue and wish-filled. I’d caught myself a few times staring at him in class. OK, a lot.
“Wheels,” I reminded them, and Joe said, “Shit.”
I’d driven out with Candace in her car. Curtis had gotten a lift with Sondra. Joe and Mary Anne had doubled up with Gabriella and Allison. And we could forget any of them. Candace was too loyal to Sondra, and Gabriella and Allison loved peace and harmony.
Curtis jiggled something in his bermudas pocket, then waved a single Honda key at us. “She let me drive,” he said.
“I know you’re all tired,” Sondra said at 10:30, after another round of breathing and after Gabriella had practically put us to sleep with a reading of her Evening Papers, something with a coyote and a shaman and a crow. The desert was turning some of us into really bad imitations of Carlos Castaneda. “You’re out of your natural environment,” crooned Sondra
. “That can be pretty absorbing and exhausting. And then, some of you,” she looked at Mary Anne, “are suffering from separation anxiety. No caffeine, no freeways, no phones. My, how will we ever survive?”
“Gosh, Sondra, I honestly don’t know,” Mary Anne said.
But Sondra left us with something that would, in fact, occupy us all night and all morning, would carry us into the next day’s session, which, she’d decided, would not begin until after lunch — Curtis threw me a yes! look — and it was this: silence. We were to exercise silence, to experience silence. “And I mean it,” she said. “No words, except those on paper. If you cheat,” and she tried so hard, you could tell, not to look at Mary Anne and Joe, but did anyway, “you are only cheating yourself and your work. And if that isn’t enough of a deterrent, think of each other. When you speak you are not only destroying your quiet, but that of your fellows.”
“What exactly is the point?” asked Mary Anne, and for once I wished she would just take her foot off the brake and go.
“You’ll find out,” Sondra said, and then quite sweetly, I thought, blew a kiss in Mary Anne’s direction.
Outside, Curtis broke the ban almost immediately. “Fuck this,” he growled.
I grinned and made a zipper sign over my mouth. It didn’t actually sound bad, not talking for fourteen whole hours. With the monster personas among us, it might be the only way I would make any headway on the screenplay I was secretly working on.
“But what about San Diego?” he stage-whispered at Mary Anne when she and Joe came outside.
“If I don’t get some coffee, I’m going to kill someone before dawn,” said Mary Anne, not even trying to keep her voice down.
Curtis threw his arm around her and Joe lit up, inhaled from his toes. Candace came out and looked at me questioningly, but nodded when I made a walking gesture with two fingers. I was known for my walks, even in big, bad L.A. She gave me a loose hug, the only kind she knew I was comfortable with, and headed back toward our building. Gabriella and Allison came tiptoeing out of Sondra’s room, as if moving silently was also part of the mandate. They were so cute, both short and chunky, in their long shorts and Benetton polo shirts. They gave us nighty-night waves and headed off.