by Denise Roig
There were maps in Sondra’s glove compartment. Maps for places like New Mexico, Vancouver Island, and one of those block-by-block books for Boston that tells you where the best brew pubs are and about the real story behind Paul Revere’s midnight ride. But nothing for Southern California.
Curtis said, “Fuck that. We’re smart people, right?” and let the car coast down the hill until we got to the circular driveway at the entrance. The Casa Polarity sign was still lit up, though it was nearly 11:00 and they were strict about not allowing guests to arrive after 8:00. I noticed, as I hadn’t twelve hours earlier, that parts of the O and P in Polarity were out.
“Look, Casa Hilarity!” I said and felt instantaneous disappointment. Ten minutes into the pledge, and I’d sold it, the peace and the promise, for the chance to entertain the troops. Joe just looked at me, and Mary Anne said, “Blew it, Jen.” Curtis gunned the car, trying to make up for our wimpy, noiseless escape. “Goodbye, funny farm!” he said.
We’d arranged ourselves with me and Joe in the back seat and Curtis and Mary Anne up front, a breaking up of the natural coupling, though the thought of me and Curtis as a couple made me cringe. And blush. He was turning out to be even more of a brat than I’d imagined. But at the same time, he was looking awfully, awfully good in the moonlight. I glanced over at Joe, who was staring out his window. Curtis was right. We were smart. We were heading south. Sooner or later we’d hit San Diego.
“There was a ’feine junkie named Joe, who drove like a fiend to Diego,” I said and could see Joe smile, though he only turned his head slightly.
“I’m wondering why we do it,” Mary Anne said. “Why we subject ourselves to this week after week. In my case, year after year.” Considering Mary Anne’s nearly weekly acts of defiance, she was actually Sondra’s oldest student, having done her workshops for going on seven years.
“You must be getting something out of it,” said Curtis.
“Yeah, Mary Anne,” I said. I felt irritated with her, as if my failure to keep silent was her fault.
“She’s good comedy material,” Mary Anne said.
“Come on,” I said.
“Well, dear heart, why are you in there?” I knew she’d throw it back. Sometimes I wondered why I liked her.
“Writer’s block,” I said. “Stasis. Stagnation.” It was true. I’d written up a storm my first six years in L.A., with a partner, then with another partner, then on my own, then with two women, neither of whom I was speaking to now. Sandollar, Dolly Parton’s production company, had almost bought a script. Such near misses. Two years ago I wrote my best all-time script, a date movie with a techno twist, but I guess I’d burned too much goodwill by then. No one would look at it. And then I hit the wall. No new ideas, no ideas at all. This went on for a good half year until I met Candace in a spinning class at the gym. Candace — a short-story writer with two collections out and pretty good reviews — had recently joined Sondra’s writing group, because, as she put it, she’d run out of ink.
“Seems like there’s a lot of losers in there,” Curtis said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not you guys,” he said. “But you know…Candace and her weeping fits, our dykey friends. I always get their names mixed up…Gabriellison.”
Mary Anne laughed and rolled down her window. The car filled with desert wind. It wasn’t a warm wind. It made my head ache more. There were stones in there now, boulders pressing from inside.
“For your information,” I said, “Candace has two books of stories out, good books, and Gabriella and Allison have just remounted, at the Odyssey, a play they co-wrote. I saw it last week and it’s good. You should go.”
I could see Joe shaking his head in the dark. And it hit me, kapow! that Curtis was talking about Joe. Joe was what you might call an enthusiastic contender. He had some ideas, and some nice moments when he concentrated, but writing was still pretty much a dream for him. Candace thought Sondra kept him around because he was such a cheerleader for the rest of us.
“The play’s not that good. Be honest, Jennifer. Joe and I went last week,” said Mary Anne.
“So if we’re all so monumentally untalented and you’re so fed up with Sondra, why keep coming back?” I was surprised at how monumentally annoyed I felt. And how much I was letting it out. Usually I just fester. “I must really need coffee,” I said.
“Don’t apologize. I always thought you could do with more of an edge,” said Mary Anne. “As to why I haul myself to Sondra’s pied-à-terre every week just so I can write bad poetry? Well, you know, darling, I think I always wanted to be the next Anne Sexton. Or what the hell, the next Sylvia Plath.” She blew pretend cigarette smoke out the window. “Now I know why those women offed themselves. All those truncated lines, all that alliteration and those pregnant, fecund images. All that pressure to be”…she waved her arm… “poetic.”
“You’re funny,” said Curtis. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Yeah, a few times,” said Mary Anne.
“Anybody think about the extra mileage on this thing? Like 250 miles?” I asked.
“We’ll say some of her Indian spirits borrowed it. They thought Honda was an Apache word, not Japanese.” And Mary Anne chanted, “Hondaaaa, Hondaaaa, Hondaaaa. That’s TV Indian for firewater.”
“You’re funny,” said Curtis.
It was quiet for a minute and then Mary Anne asked, “Think so?”
Curtis was a demon driver. We were flying through the night, the high desert (or the low desert…ten years in La-La Land and I still didn’t know the difference) splintered in two, “sundered by the speed of our need,” Plath might have said. Or Mary Anne.
Curtis and Mary Anne were on to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Sam whatshisname, the comic who said fuck every second, who was dead now, when I finally noticed the obvious: Joe still wasn’t talking. I poked him on the arm. He looked at me, startled, and I felt another tug of disappointment. He was really in there, in the quiet with himself. Having outed myself so willingly, I was now back in the world of agents, pagers and egos. My world and welcome to it.
“Hi,” I waved and Joe smiled a smile of such sympathy I wanted to cry. My short, lost silence. My short, lost career as a screenwriter. Coleman. Joe took my hand and held it, and that’s how we pulled into Temecula, California, Capital of the Desert.
Only one gas station seemed to be open. Mary Anne bolted from the car, which Curtis parked at a lazy angle across two spots. He hummed and drummed, not bothering with Joe or me. Mary Anne came back with two Styrofoam cups, handed one to Curtis.
“You guys want any?” she asked. Joe shook his head.
“Please,” I said, amazed she’d forgotten me. I handed her a dollar bill and Mary Anne put her cup on the dash and went back inside.
“Get two more, OK?” Curtis said to Mary Anne when she came back with my cup. “Two cups each should hold us until San Diego.” She hesitated. He hadn’t even offered to pay for the first round. She trotted back in. I heard Joe breathe in.
“Starbucks, Starbucks,” Mary Anne chanted as she got back in.
“Baby, don’t I know it,” said Curtis. And accelerating the Honda beyond its limits, got us out of town and onto the 15 South.
The coffee was hot but awful, more chicory than bean. I hoped Joe would take my hand again, but he didn’t.
Once Coleman and I had driven all over Hollywood for a coffee he couldn’t live without. Some decaf blend he claimed gave him a lift without messing with his metabolism. Coleman was always worried about his energy levels, had to eat the right combination of things at the right time of day, had to sleep eight and three-quarters hours a night. Before he left for New York he went on an eating plan based on his blood type. I couldn’t remember exactly what type he was, O positive maybe, but it meant he had to eat an awful lot of red meat, an awful lot for someone who was against eating meat for spiritual reasons.
Coleman also had ideas about sex. I wondered if he was imposing them — X n
umber of times per week, to orgasm or not to orgasm — on the new girl. I didn’t know for sure there was a new girl in New York. But I could so easily imagine someone dark-haired and long-legged, a dancer maybe in the show, someone adoring and simple who came with the territory.
I’ll come out for Labour Day to see the show, I said before he left. We can write letters. I love writing letters. Let’s see, he said.
Curtis and Mary Anne were singing now. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” Coffee isn’t like a drug. It is a drug. “I kept my promise, don’t keep your distance.” Mary Anne had a good voice with lots of vibrato and confidence. He could sing, too, his voice higher and more tender than I would have thought.
“You’re great,” Curtis said.
“Yeah?” said Mary Anne and looked back at Joe. But Joe was asleep, his head leaning against the window.
“Hey, Joe-Joe, easy not to talk when you’re asleep,” said Mary Anne.
“You know the songs from Sondheim’s Company? They’re fucking beautiful,” said Curtis.
When I woke up we were coming into Escondido and the temperature in the car was way up. They were back to Evita, Mary Anne singing, more wistfully, “I’d be surprisingly good for you.”
I sat up straighter and realized four things: they were holding hands across the gear shift, Joe was awake, staring straight ahead at Mary Anne’s headrest, it was close to 2:00 a.m., and my headache was gone.
“Hey, dreamers,” Curtis talked to me through the rear-view mirror. “How about Tour B? We stop here in Escondido, find a Starbucks, do a drive by the San Diego Wild Animal Park, though we’re still at least an hour out of San Diego, so I don’t know why they don’t just call it the Escondido Wild Animal Park, do you know why, Mary Anne?” He was speedy with chicory.
“Tour B also includes time out at a cheap motel,” he added. “I need to crash for a few hours if I’m going to get us back to Casa Hilarity in time before our Sondra discovers something large missing.”
“I can drive,” I said. “I can take over.”
“I don’t think that would be right,” said Curtis, not looking at me through the mirror any more. “It is Sondra’s car.”
“I’m really tired, too,” said Mary Anne. And I realized they’d worked this out already. We were going to check into a motel so they could have a go at each other. That’s what I’d felt on waking up. That crackle in the air, that gotta-have-it frequency. I nudged Joe and he turned to me, looking so unlike himself. So…vacant.
Escondido was a sleepy old suburban place. But we finally turned up some Starbucks at an all-night convenience store. It was empty, with pinball machines and loud music and an elaborate coffee counter lined with huge coffee flasks. Mary Anne and Curtis conferred over what they would get and settled on sharing extra-large cups of Ethiopian and French Roast. I’d only known Curtis for a short time, but I’d never seen him look so happy. Joe stood at the magazine counter, but didn’t pick up anything.
“How’s the French Roast?” I asked Curtis who’d already taken a long swig and topped his off again.
“Good. Do you have a few bucks on you? I left all my money back in the room. I’ll pay you when we get back, don’t worry.” I gave him my last five, and opened the tap on the Kenya. I had just enough change for a medium.
Curtis and Mary Anne left me at the cash and went back outside. I saw them drift around the side of the store. Joe was still at the magazine rack, looking but not touching. With the all-night fluorescents and more caffeine, I felt like I was on Pluto, loneliest little planet in the universe.
Joe looked at me and pointed to a magazine. Hustler. We both smiled at that, then went out to the car, which Curtis had neglected to lock. We sat there for a long time, maybe an hour, until the other two came back. They weren’t singing or holding hands. They were just back to being themselves.
“Tour C,” Mary Anne announced to the back seat.
“They probably have alarms at the animal place anyway. In case someone wants to do the nasty with the beasties. You know, hump the hippo?” said Curtis. Nobody laughed.
For the next three hours, all the way back to Casa Hilarity, nobody spoke. Joe went back to sleep. I could hear his head now and then bumping the window. Mary Anne looked straight ahead. Curtis floored it.
I had a weird little dream about Candace where she was a checker at a grocery and wouldn’t let me pass for reasons known only to herself. She waved one of those rubber divider sticks you use to keep your groceries separate from the guy’s in front of you and shrieked verbs at me. Awake, I took out my notebook and looked over my earlier verb list.
Pranam. Such a beautiful word, really, though I remembered that each time I was resistant. It was more than just not wanting to get down on a dusty old floor; it was the idea of subjugating myself, being that worshipful. It seemed, standing, such a long way down. But once I was there, it was peace unknown, my arms stretching over my head in full-body surrender, every part of me touching the ground. Once, when Guruji came to do a special intensive with the most devoted among us, we’d pranamed on the grass. Devotees. I hadn’t thought that word in such a long time.
I’d tried to explain it to Coleman once, those years when I was in a spell of meditating and chanting and of service, which was a nice way of saying menial labour. But really, I told him, “Chopping onions for vats of stew at the ashram was like a meditation.”
“Sounds like brainwashing, Jen,” he’d said. “But then you are so highly suggestible,” and he’d grabbed me and pulled me into him, because those were the days when he wanted me at least some of the time.
I couldn’t explain that it was nothing like brainwashing. “Detach,” Guruji said. The first time I heard him say that — it was on a video shown at our meditation centre, since Guruji lived in India and could be with us in the flesh only rarely — I knew this was it. All my pain had to do with being stuck with the hopeful, hurtful glue of expectations. People, places and things, that was my undoing. All I had to do was unstick and I would be free and happy.
Guruji came to our little centre after I’d been doing my practices for nearly two years. I was free. I was happy. Or at least freer and happier. I was celibate for the first time since sixteen, still not having figured out how to do love and stay detached. I’d seen pictures of our guru, but I’d been unprepared for what a tiny, merry creature he was. He laughed all the time, his belly quivering under his robes, his head nodding slightly, rapidly, blissfully, side to side.
“Guruji,” one of us would ask during satsang, our evening chats, “how does one have physical needs and still follow a spiritual path?”
Ahh, he’d murmur. And his head would bob more joyfully. “The body is spirit. The spirit is body. There is no separation.” Ahh, we’d murmur.
I sat at his feet for the whole of his two-week visit. Sometimes when he’d swat me with his peacock feather, I thought I could see a special gleam in his eyes. I was burning up all my dead, old karma. My illusions were toast. On his last night, Guruji asked to see some of us separately, a few of us women who’d helped set up the centre each night for satsang. We waited outside the small room we’d furnished with a purple loveseat, candles and pictures of Shiva. When it was my turn, he didn’t speak, just bobbed his head and gleamed at me. But when I closed the door, he lifted up my sari, fondled all my parts, and pushed me down, face down, onto the Oriental carpet we’d bought at Pier One and which I’d vacuumed each night of his visit. His belly was soft against me. Ahh, he said when he came.
The sky had been lightening at its furthest fringes for a while, but as we came into Temecula, then just as quickly left Temecula, the sky burst open above and around us. We were in a huge glorious bowl turning blue and crimson and fuchsia, lighter and lighter every second. I watched it as I’ve never watched anything. I could hear Joe breathing and Mary Anne; Curtis, too, though his breath seemed to be held. We all saw it. Still, we didn’t speak, not even when we pulled into Casa Polarity’s circular drive and inched our
way back to our departure point, the parking space right under Sondra’s window.
I half-expected to see her face in the window, her expression not at all inscrutable, but the curtain was drawn and no one was about. We separated right away, as if we couldn’t bear to be together a second longer. Though they were sharing a room, Joe and Curtis walked a few feet apart, Joe leading the way. Mary Anne speed-walked toward the room she was sharing with Gabriella and Allison. (Gabriellison. It was one of the night’s best lines.)
I stood on the walk, indecisive, as they scattered. Candace would probably wake up and want to know where I’d been and why, but then it hit me that she wouldn’t be able to say any of that, not a word. I laughed out loud at the thought of a silenced Candace and the sound was so strange and so wonderful after all that chatter and all that silence. I found a little hillock of grass, dewy but not cold, and sat.
It was only 6:00, but the community was stirring. Some women hurried by, linens stacked in their arms. Were they cowed by their men, their domestic duties? All that roughage? Or were they almost free in their little veggie world of laundry and married sex? At least some things were clear. Because only a fool would think any of this was simple. I thought of Curtis and Mary Anne and Joe, that weird triangulation. I thought of Coleman, his decaf, his dick. I thought of Candace and all her hurt, Sondra and the novel she would someday have to finish. I even thought of Griffin and Nippy, those waterlogged boys. I watched the silent women and when the sun was directly in my eyes, I took out my notebook and began to write. I had no idea what it would be.