The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  She thought, I slept with your boyfriend. Your boyfriend, he’s the one who took my virginity. Just a few days ago, his hands were here and here and here.

  She thought, and wished the words could seep out of her and into the air, Your boyfriend prefers the strange girls, the ones like me.

  The drama girl got up, licking her fingers, and left the parlor. Nicole followed her out the door and down the sidewalk. The words she wanted to say circulated through her blood, a hot, toxic sludge. She knew that this girl, a stranger, had done nothing wrong. But still she followed. She was a malevolent ghost, a bad spirit, whether Catholic or Buddhist, and she would stalk this girl, would hunt her to the ends of the earth like the dogs of sin, the swine of greed, the cock of wrath. She walked fast, dodging people on the busy shopping street. She watched the girl pause and look in windows, her movements easy and unhurried, the long, strong ponytail swishing and flicking like it was alive.

  The words moved through Nicole’s body the way the words of a mantra were supposed to become flesh: I slept with your boyfriend. He wanted me. He would choose me. He will.

  The girl ducked into a pharmacy. Nicole stayed an aisle away, fumbling with the mints. She saw her contemplating a wall of greeting cards. She examined those cheap, maudlin cards as though they carried the secret of love. Nicole picked up a candy bar and gripped it until the chocolate softened in her fist. How laughable this girl was, how un-special. I’ll show you, Jules. I’m screwed up. I’m wild. I’m dangerous. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

  Nicole walked down the aisle. She was beside the drama girl now, pretending to flip through the Father’s Day cards. “Hey, don’t I know you from school?” she said, her voice coming out low and husky.

  Drama girl stiffened, looked her quickly up and down, figuring out if she was somebody important. “Oh, yeah. You were in Guys and Dolls, weren’t you? In the chorus?”

  “Yeah.” Nicole kept her eyes on the cards, carefully turning them one by one.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nicole.”

  “Nicole, right. How’s it going?” How blandly friendly this girl was willing to be.

  “Do you know a guy named Jules?”

  “Jules, of course—you know he’s my boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, I know him.” The words were close, very close. “You could say I know him.”

  Now drama girl was suspicious. She couldn’t miss the edge in Nicole’s tone. “What, did you guys used to go out or something?”

  “Something like that. We are now.”

  The girl put down the card she was holding. Looked her up and down, closer this time. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like. Jules and I are dating. And I wanted to tell you—” She gulped at the words. “I wanted to tell you you’re wasting your time with him. You’re not the kind of girl he wants.”

  Drama girl didn’t speak at first, just kept staring at her. “Yeah, I know you. Everyone thinks you’re a fucking weirdo. What the fuck do you think you’re doing, messing around with my boyfriend? Why don’t you get a life?”

  “You should talk to him about that. He asked me out. I didn’t know he was seeing you, but now that I do, well—you’re wasting your time. You should give him up.” They were standing next to the giant plastic tree filled with greeting cards. Around them, through the throbbing of her heart, she could still hear the monotonous whirr of the automatic door opening and closing, the clerk ringing up someone’s items, the bell chiming each time a prescription was ready. Both of them facing each other, surprised, not sure what would happen next.

  Drama girl found her footing first, seemed to remember the next thing to say in the script. “And what’ll you do if I don’t?”

  “You don’t know what I’ll do. I’m a fucking weirdo, remember?” And without a pause she grabbed the card tree, toppling it in one magnificent crash. Greeting cards rained down all around them: cartoon bears hugging cartoon hippos, floppy-eared puppies and kittens in oversized shoes, all of them falling in chaos.

  Look at the body, diseased, impure, rotten. / Focus the mind on all this foulness. / Your body is like this, / And this is like your body. / It stinks of decay, / Only a fool would love it.

  When Jules drove her home from their late-night dates, spent smoking and chatting on Eddie’s couch, they crawled along the dark streets, watching for overzealous suburban cops. She remembered staring at the little houses shut up for the night in a hazy awe. They were so safe, so impregnable, such tidy, sweet Colonial houses. High many-paned windows. Lace curtains. Swing sets in the backyards. Half-frozen snow piles that wouldn’t melt until April. Clapboard, brick, and slate, all weatherproofed for storms and snow, their gutters choked with leaves. People sleeping inside, enclosed in their private worlds.

  And she, stinking of skunky weed, of beer, sweat, of saltier body fluids, her hair clammed to her skin—she was welcome in none of these houses.

  “So you’re some kind of freak, I hear,” he said to her without looking over. “Causing chaos in CVS and whatnot.”

  “Maybe.” So word had gotten back about the incident with the drama girl. She watched his hand drift easily on the steering wheel. “Is that what you think?”

  “I think you’re not the good little Catholic girl I thought you were.” He pulled up at the corner as always. “See you tomorrow?” He leaned in for his kiss, and he put his arm around her, drawing her close in a new way, something that felt more tender. They did not mention the drama girl again, but word went around school that she was now dating the lacrosse star.

  Every few weekends Paul visited from college in New York and they went to Dairy Joy, the joint out in Weston famous for its homemade soft-serve. By fall it was really too cold for ice cream, but they were New Englanders and ate sitting in his car in their parkas.

  “What’s going on at school?” he asked.

  “Jeez, you’re consulting with Mom and Dad now? Do they send you my grades? I’ve been busy.”

  Paul had come home from college wearing a suit and tie and had tucked a paper napkin into his collar to protect it as he ate. His new girlfriend, Marion, had picked out the tie, he’d said. It was the most expensive article of clothing he’d ever owned. “Busy doing what? This Buddhist stuff you told me about on the phone? What exactly do you do? Chant mantras and wave incense around?”

  “No, Paul. That’s what you do when you’re a Catholic, remember?”

  He laughed and said, “Got me there,” but it was the first time she had implied that she was not a Catholic.

  “A lot is at stake,” he said. “Wait until you get to college; then you can be whoever. But don’t fuck up your life now, before you have a chance.”

  “You’re so dramatic.”

  “I mean it.”

  She thought he was her best chance for understanding. She wanted to tell him about the Karmapa in Colorado, the books she’d been taking out of the library about him. He had fled terrible slaughter in Tibet and set up a temple in the Rockies, attracting new followers. She’d read, You keep going. That is the bodhisattva’s way. As long as it benefits even one being you have to, without any sense of discouragement, go on.

  “There’s this trip I want to take, maybe next summer. There’s this monk, called the Karmapa, in Colorado. He’s the next ranking lama under the Dalai Lama, and he’s the head of this—well, like a monastery, but for the laity.”

  “So it’s a commune.”

  “No! More like a spiritual retreat. I want to meet him.”

  “I don’t know. You, going alone, to some camp for unwashed hippies—”

  “Thanks, Paul. Is that what you think? Making fun of a religion practiced by only about a billion people.”

  “Do you speak Tibetan? What are you and this Karmapa guy going to talk about?”

  “It’s a quest, okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just something I have to do.”

  She was
lucky, she knew, to have Paul, even when he made fun of her. They’d knock on each other’s walls at night in the code they had established as children. They knew where their mother’s antique dolls were buried in the yard.

  The lowest of places, on examination, has a surplus; the highest of places, when leveled, has a deficit. Holding still and letting go are both right here, but is there a way out?

  —Commentary on the Blue Cliff Record

  Her mother returned, freckled and a little more relaxed, and the basement year trickled by. She was seventeen and she began hiding her report cards and faking her parents’ signatures on letters sent home. The spring air held its annual promise. On a blustery Sunday after church, Nicole’s family went walking at World’s End, a harbor and nature preserve on Massachusetts Bay. Nicole’s parents walked arm in arm, both of them shapeless in their old blue barn jackets. Paul and Nicole walked behind in a companionable silence. The wind tore at her hair. It ruffled the golden-green cattails down by the water.

  Their mother climbed out onto an overhang of rock as the wind pulled at her playfully, and she planted her hands on her hips and shouted, “I can see around the world from here!” She looked beautiful, and Nicole felt a hopeful pride.

  Clouds gathered in the narrow neck of the bay. They all ran for cover and sat in the car without starting it while the rain pounded around them, falling across the windows in thick silver curtains. Thunder went off like a bomb, and they saw lightning, a strange alien green through the clouds.

  After a while, Nicole’s father turned the engine and pulled away. She looked around the car, at Paul watching the trees flash by, at the back of her mother’s head. In church the priest had read from Corinthians: Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. But she was her own; she was unique, something her family could not understand.

  Later that spring, Eddie brought his new girlfriend into their basement world. Willa came thumping down the stairs of Eddie’s basement in giant black lace-up boots and surveyed them for a moment before declaring, “Some party, Ed.” She was a proto-Goth, wearing a black skirt and an oversized black shirt, and she had thin black lips. It was the first time Nicole had seen the look. In small towns in the Midwest, teenagers had been accused of Satanism for years, but it had yet to reach preppy, mainstream New England. “I’m Nicole,” she said.

  “Willa practices Tantra,” Eddie announced. “You know, she’s a Buddhist, too.”

  “Tantra?”

  Willa shook her necklace, a chain of skulls the size of marbles. “It’s the only way to access the authentic truth, you know?”

  Nicole’s hands tingled; this was the first other Buddhist she had known since Kumiko. She felt suddenly ashamed and nervous. Now all the talk she had been putting out about Buddhism could be challenged. She would be revealed as a tourist, a gawking fan.

  Willa sat with her large white legs in Eddie’s lap, swigging her beer and laughing at Jules for being too cool and Eddie for being too geeky. She threw the Diamond Sutra into the conversation (“No one is liberated until we’re all liberated. That’s what it says. Sounds a lot like communism, doesn’t it, Eds?”), her big knees dwarfing Eddie’s, talking about how cute Eddie had seemed when he’d asked her out. “We were in the 7-Eleven. He looked like some poor puppy somebody’d left in a box. Right, Mr. Ed?”

  Eddie laughed nervously.

  “You meditate?” Willa asked Nicole.

  “A little. I’m not very good.”

  “I hear that. But it’s not about tamping all that mental energy down. It’s about letting it out. Finding doors to open.” She grinned, ran her tongue over her teeth so they could see its silver stud.

  “How else do you pray?” asked Jules. “I hear Tantra is all about the body.” Of course he would ask that. They’d already been there for hours, grinning at each other in the light of the muted TV.

  Willa smiled, playing with her chain of skulls. “You don’t know the first thing about it, buddy boy. Tantra is pure joy.” She took Jules’s cigarette right out of his mouth and pulled on it. “You’ve got to loosen up, crack your head open, let all the good stuff in.”

  They smoked a joint and Jules produced a handful of pills that made the walls of the room creep in and pulse with warmth.

  Willa wanted to investigate the rest of the house. “Come on, Edster, let us out of the dungeon.”

  “All right, all right. But don’t make a mess—my parents will kill me.” Eddie had kept them corralled in the basement all this time, insisting that they enter through the bulkhead.

  They trooped upstairs. Eddie’s parents were away on vacation; they never missed the ski season in the Alps, apparently, but Eddie had school to go to, and so he was left to his own devices. The house was still, the gleaming countertops, the stainless steel appliances all undisturbed. Nicole wandered from room to room, seeing esoteric artworks and African sculptures, fine mid-century modern furniture, the chairs and tables all sleek and minimal and arranged at perpendicular angles. Here and there, a small corner of Eddie’s existence: sneakers fenced in a tray; a soccer ball up on a shelf; a single report card on the fridge.

  Jules saw it, too. “Man, do they ever let you out of the basement?”

  Eddie shrugged. “I chose it.”

  “Your bedroom?”

  “They turned it into an exercise room. I liked the basement better.” Of course, it suited him, Nicole thought; it suited his romantic fervor. He wanted to be the misunderstood Communist ranting from his garret, his Notes from the Underground at his side. How many suburban kids wished they could lead their own rebellion or thought they were leading one already? It was kind of sweet.

  “They don’t bother me, and I don’t bother them,” said Eddie fiercely. “As long as I bring the grades in, they don’t know I exist. And one day I can go.”

  “You shouldn’t wait around for them to notice you,” Willa said. “Make them notice.”

  She slid open the back door. Out beyond the lawn there was only darkness; Eddie’s house flanked a protected bird habitat. In the lights from the house they could just see a stand of trees at the edge of the darkness. “Come on,” she said.

  She started off across the lawn, and Nicole and Jules followed. “It’s off-limits at night, you can’t go,” Eddie yelled from the door. But Willa didn’t stop, and Nicole, heart thumping, followed. “Nicole,” Eddie said, as though he knew she was the only one who might see reason. “Nicole, I just wanted—”

  “All ashore that’s going ashore, Eddie,” Willa called over her shoulder. Nicole went on.

  “Come back,” Eddie cried again, forlorn. But Willa, with her necklace of skulls, was the only one leading the real rebellion. Nicole wanted to impress her, show her they were worth her time.

  “I am the night Buddha,” she whooped into the darkness. “I am the Buddha with no name!” She grabbed Jules’s shoulders from behind and he piggybacked her across the wet lawn.

  They climbed the low fence at the edge of Eddie’s lawn and took a few cautious steps on the pine needles. It was already so dark here, the lights of the house far away. The three of them ran, calling to one another, making ghost sounds and jumping out from behind trees. Nicole ran until her hands touched a scratchy tree trunk, the blackness around her so thick it felt like a second skin. There was something happening, a dizzy wildness in her. Then Jules was there, a tiny cell phone light reflecting on his face. “Where’s Willa?”

  “Here.” Willa’s breathy voice was a surprise on the back of Nicole’s neck. She moved lightly around them, just skirting the flashlight, laughing. “Hey, we could have some real fun,” she said.

  Nicole and Jules stared at each other in the cell phone’s blue glow, and then Jules made a face, startled but excited, and she knew Willa had her hands on him. She waited, heart thumping, wondering what would happen next. Then a hand was on her waist. “You can open y
ourself to the universe of the dharma if you practice Tantra,” Willa said. “In the Tibetan temples, the dakinis are the goddesses of wisdom, and they dispense pleasure freely.” Her voice, her hands kept traveling around them. Jules’s eyes didn’t leave Nicole’s. “They make the holy union of the Tantra possible,” Willa said.

  Jules reached for Nicole, kissed her hard and hungrily. She was hungry, too. Willa laughed in the darkness. Nicole imagined walking back to the lit house, rejoining Eddie. They could listen to their Kurt Cobain albums and play at being revolutionaries and everything would still be all right. But it was too late for that, wasn’t it? She’d made her choice, walked out willingly. Willa’s trespassing hands, her generous body, drew the three of them together.

  If you have a home, leave your home. If you have beloved ones, leave them.

  —Dogen

  She came home late, her body raw, her lips and legs hurting. And maybe it was this that made her enter through the kitchen door instead of slinking through the garage, slamming it without any attempt at deception. Her parents glided downstairs, belting their matching robes, Paul, visiting from business school, behind them in his boxers, his hair wild. She stayed behind the kitchen counter, afraid to let them get too close, afraid of her own smell.

  “You want to tell us where you’ve been?” her father began. She knew the script; they all did.

  “Out. Out with friends.”

  It was her mother she was afraid of, pale and silent, bleeding disappointment.

  “Who?” Her father demanded. “With the same friends you’ve been sneaking out with every goddamned night?”