by Iyer, Pico
Anyway, Rumi had never had to see his love grow old—or his Beloved; the death had saved them both from that. And then, looking at his watch, he saw it was two-fifty-eight. The seminar would be beginning in two minutes.
He raced down the steps, taking them two at a time, down eight floors, and sprinted across the campus, past the lazy clusters of kids at picnic tables, looking up at him in surprise from their yawning days. By the time he’d run up to the fourth-floor conference room, too much in a hurry even to wait for the elevator, Kevin was already well embarked on his talk on “Religion as a Grown-up Fairy Tale,” drawing, no doubt, on his years with Bettelheim.
“Even as children,” Kevin was saying as he came in, looking around for a spare chair, “even as children,” underlining with his repetition the intrusion brought upon them by the latecomer, “we have some intimation of a world beyond our own, another realm behind the garden wall, as you might say. We do not have to see it or describe it; we feel it in our bones. We are captive to what you might call ‘metaphysical nostalgia.’ The longing, as C. S. Lewis might have said, for the far side of the wardrobe.”
He looked around so all could fully appreciate the wisdom, and then prepared to continue. But just as he was starting up, the disheveled intruder suddenly broke in. “Children haven’t been told to act as if this is the only truth there is,” he said, and he saw several heads look up, as if startled. The rules of the seminar were so well known they didn’t need to be spelled out. The speaker read his paper, and only when he was finished did questions or rebuttals begin. As the interruption subsided, looks stole around the room: “John Macmillan’s well and truly lost it.”
“We might therefore provisionally assert,” Kevin began again, trying to find his footing, “that religion is at some level a sanctioned fairy tale through which society transmits its lessons to the young. It is the story told around the campfire, by which the elders pass on and down their customs and beliefs.”
A few students were taking notes so furiously that it was a safe bet they were jotting down ideas for theses of their own; others looked at Kevin with such rapt attention that they were presumably off in Vietnam or the Amazon, collecting data from their field trips. “Religion, then”—the speaker pushed his way on—“is the way we ritualize and encode, the way we sanctify, you could say, the stories that bind the community together. The gods are myths enjoining us to act as if the stories of the gods were true.”
Kevin paused again, to let everyone take in this cunning formulation.
“Hence my phrase, ‘Religion, the Grown-up Fairy Tale.’ Religion is a fairy tale for those of us ostensibly grown up. Religion is the fairy tale that’s grown up with us, our companion. And religion is a fairy tale that’s grown into a structure so enveloping we could call it the institution of society itself. It is, we might usefully say, the spiritual equivalent to the Bill of Rights—or the Highway Code, at least.”
“But there’s more to it than that.” He couldn’t seem to stop himself, though again people looked up (Sefadhi, in his seat, discreetly looked away). “Stories are more mobile than that. They change as we do, assume different colors depending on how we look at them; just as you say, they grow up as we do. They aren’t static narratives; they fit themselves around us like our shoes.”
He could feel the excitement in the room, made keen by a sense of helplessness: the whole well-oiled juggernaut of the seminar was hurtling out of control, and since there was nothing they could do about it, the people around the table had decided to enjoy the sensation of novelty. It was the first real thing that had happened all year.
“What if fairy tales bind us together in a kind of dissent?” he went on, as if he hadn’t noticed how the room had changed around him. “What if they work outside the laws of society, and even against them? They speak for subversion as much as for order.”
“Quite so,” said the chairman, seeing his chance to rescue things. “The value of transgression. Saturnalia, the Lord of Misrule, all of that. We need ways to release, or express, our demons as much as to go about our business.”
“Mardi Gras,” said a small voice in the corner, and the chair, relieved, said, “Exactly so. Examples can be found in every field.”
“But no, it’s something more than that,” the intruder said, and now the room was electric. The rumor had it that he’d been off ever since his trip to Damascus the year before—“under a foreign influence,” as the person who knew him best, Alejandro Mazzini, said. It was said he’d stopped handing in chapters to Sefadhi, and was running off in search of manuscripts that didn’t exist; he’d taken the Sufi madness all too seriously. “A story has as many secrets as a person does. Hidden implications, shadow meanings, layers that lead to other layers. And the most interesting part of a story is the part we don’t see at first, where the clues are all hidden. The princess in the tower asks the gallant knight to save her, say. But maybe the real meaning of the story is that the knight is moved to the quest by pride, or stubbornness. Maybe he’s only using the princess as a way of playing out some urge that has nothing to do with her at all. Maybe, as the Gnostics say, she’s only a reflection of another part of him, a higher self that is imprisoned, and so his risking his life for her has nothing to do with her, but only him.”
The room was silent; he’d plunged off a cliff, and no one else would follow.
“And maybe”—now there was no stopping him—“maybe, when he breaks in on her little room in the tower, he sees that he’s really the captive, and she’s the one who can release him. That he is carrying the castle with him everywhere he goes, while she, in her tiny chamber, is quite free. And maybe, further, when he carries her down the stairs and out into the world, she’s terrified. She doesn’t want to leave the castle, everything she knows. She’s never been on a horse before. The knight has thrown himself into the story and made it his own. Without even noticing that it’s not the story he had thought it was.”
“A great burst of eloquence,” the chairman noted dryly, not unhappy to be given the chance to exercise his power. “And, to go back to Kevin’s thesis—our reason for being here, after all—what do we think of religion as a form of collective, even we might say collectivist, myth-making?”
And Kevin took the reins again, and spoke up for law and order.
By the time the presentation was over, there was very little time for questions, and the buzz that was running through the room clearly had to go outside with its news, to be released. Someone said something about Jung, and Vijay Mishra, from England, asked, as he always asked, about Northrop Frye. Elaine, who had almost completed her dissertation on female shamans in Korea, said, “Maybe we could say that fairy tales are our way—our only way—of privileging the ghosts that our official textbooks marginalize.”
“A fine way to conclude a memorable session,” said the chair, relieved to have brought the train safely back to its sidings. “We meet again three months from now with”—he discreetly consulted his notes—“Emma, on Hildegard of Bingen.”
“Thank you,” said Sefadhi, as he brushed past him to the corridor. “I think you’ve just made my job of telling the Department you need special treatment much easier.”
By the time he got home, taking the long way round, she was gone. He looked for a note on the desk, guessing that there would be none. He tried to see if she had left something of hers lying about, but she’d cleaned up before she left. The plates were back in the cupboards, everything was back the way it had been before she’d ever arrived.
Opening the closet, on a sudden impulse, he found it stripped of all her clothes. Previously she’d always kept something there, as a way of laying her claim to the space, and reminding him of her presence; mostly as a way to ensure that she’d always have a reason to come back.
When someone dies—he thought suddenly of Rumi, and all the ecstatic poems that had been keeping him company for years—a part of her disappears, and everything else that is suffused with her, the invisible part,
grows more intense than ever. He smelled the ylang-ylang she’d kept for weeks by his bed. He saw she’d forgotten to take away the tea she’d brought for her monthly pains. Under a pillow, a long golden hair as from a fairy tale curled out.
When he went to bed, she was closer to him than she had been for months. He talked and talked to her all night, and when it was light blew out the candle, the blue and gold of Isfahan, that was the ornament of a shared romance.
The next morning, he made a list of all the places he would not go because he had gone before with her: an anti-map of sorts. He even put away all the unread books he had by women, in case one of the novels’ scenes had a woman casting an appraising eye on men, and he saw her in the character. Yet whatever in him was taking all the precautions was not the part that might have gained from them. He rode back from the library that evening—the library had always been the safe place for being all alone—and when he saw a light on in the house, he accelerated all the way home; and then remembered it was he who’d left it on, in case she might unexpectedly return. A fool, he thought—maybe this was what she’d really left with him: her bitterness—is someone who longs for the very person he’s just banished.
She did come back, a few days later, in mid-afternoon, but it was as if it were someone else, an amateur actress, doing a poor job of impersonating her. She said “Cool!” when she saw the new cups he’d bought—she’d never used the word before—and the cross above her low-necked dress was new, or new to him. The not-so-sure, maybe former lover reads all the same texts as before, but in a different light. She was wearing her hair up, he decided, so she could take out the pins for someone else.
“The deadline’s coming up,” she said.
“Five or six weeks. More, if I get the extension.”
“And if you don’t?”
She wanted him to help her, he suspected, and to make it easier for her to leave.
“If I don’t, I have to leave the country. Abandon the thesis, as likely as not, and make another life elsewhere.”
“Leaving me where exactly?” She was looking for things that would hurt her, and this time he obliged.
“Leaving you anywhere you want to be. You’ve got time, money, you can do anything.”
He slept on the sofa that night—as if, again, he’d picked up her habit of coming upon the right gesture only after the occasion for it had passed—and the next day, seeing her lying in bed, unsleeping, waiting for something that would spring the lock, he came and sat beside her on the bed. “That park you were always mentioning? Did you ever go there?”
“How could I? I’ve been away.” Her sister had told her about a place at the foot of the hills which no one knew about; they’d resolved to go there, long ago, and make it part of the private map they were drawing up in their heads.
The sun had come up by the time they went outside, struggling through the early-morning fog, and by the time they reached the empty parking lot on the far side of town it was hot. A small trail, hardly kept up, led back through the trees; insects of some kind whirred and jittered all around. They took the narrow path up into the woods, and after a few minutes came to a stream, thin and silver, running up towards the mountains. Large boulders, logs, and branches damming and redirecting the flow.
It was a smudgy, sultry, listless afternoon, the day seeming to twitter and whine around them, and as they dandled their legs in the water, walked along the bank, the gnats, or whatever they were, buzzed and swooped. It was sticky and scratchy and hot; the day pricked at them, at their faces, the exposed parts of their skin. She put on a summer hat to protect her from the sun, and when he saw her walking down to the stream in front of him, in the long white dress and hat he’d last seen in New Mexico, he came up behind her, and kissed the back of her neck.
Hands caught hands, released; the day was hot and the water cool.
She’d brought a book of Indian love poems to read him—less to draw him in, he felt, than to shut him out in some way, to remind him of all he was closing the door on—and when she sat down on the rock, as if to read to him, he went off exploring in the woods, deeper and deeper towards their darkness. The day drowsed on, dawdling and slow, a twitter everywhere, as she paged through the gold volume with its green inscription, reading the love poems to herself.
He walked back, crackling, over twigs and leaves, and when he came back through the trees there was nothing on the rock but the book, turned over, and the fancy white pumps she’d brought. He looked along and saw her upstream, holding her dress in the way he remembered from the very first night on the beach; the water splashed against her legs, and wet spots appeared on the dress. Then, as she stumbled against a rock, her hat fell off and her hair was all loose, in her eyes, in her mouth, across her neck, a broken angel’s nest.
She came back, walking slowly, to where he sat, occasionally jumping when she hit her foot against a jagged point, or when the water suddenly grew too deep or cold. When she got back to the rock, he could see abrasions on her legs, small red cuts here and there, and when she leaned forward to kiss him, he tasted salt, sweat, hair; her legs left wet shadows on the rocks.
Her feet, her legs were cool and bare; her mouth had all the collected warmth of the drowsy afternoon. The flies, the gnats, were chattering, and from the far side of the trees they heard a car starting up, a truck perhaps, idling, footfalls, a scuttling dog. The water where it came off her legs was cool on him, her face cool and warm at once where she rested on his chest. The rock against his back warm on the naked skin, and the sun high above the trees hot in the bright afternoon.
They didn’t say anything as they lay against the rock, in the small sanctuary of the riverbed, but when she leaned over to kiss him again, loose hair, wet mouth, cool legs, warm lips, he felt her thigh urging at his in the way he recognized. Her eyes were closed; her pale face was open to the sun. She made room for him in what she called her home, and when he was there, she just said, “Whatever you do, just stay there. Don’t move.” And as he did, she began to cry again, silently, as if to force out the last vestiges of whatever remained.
She left of her own accord a little later, and as he walked her out to her car, he found a letter sticking out of his mailbox, a blue airmail envelope of the kind he knew from England. It was Hussein, of all people, thanking him fulsomely (and on an Indian time-scale) for his help of many months before, and “the authoritative insight of your scholarship.” Someone had come over from Paris, he was writing to say, also to look at the manuscript, and he, too, was a good man who understood the value of such things; but all he had done was confirm him in the wisdom of what the “English pandit” had said.
The light that was flashing on the answering machine would be Sefadhi, he thought, with some oblique reminder of the deadline, or Alex, asking him to a movie that would only bring her back into their company again; and when, towards nightfall, he pushed it, sure enough he heard the Argentine polish. “I will be away for a few weeks,” his friend announced, “I find I have a hunger for the old,” though as the words came out his listener saw someone very young, Sophie, in the sun, throwing her arms around and seeing where she might fall. Someone else was calling, a “friend of a friend,” she said, about information she had on a lost manuscript—California the home now of imported hopes—and then there was a surer voice, as from a former life: Nicki, back in West Hollywood, “rather at loose ends,” as she put it, “and wondering if you might have time for a visitor.” He remembered the last time she’d come up to look in on him and, dialing the number she’d left, said, “Why don’t I come and visit you there? Save you the drive and get myself out of the house?”
He’d caught her off-balance—done a Nicki on her, in effect—and all she could say in her surprise was, “Brilliant. I’m sure there’s room enough for two.”
She was staying in one of those bright new metallic places designed to consecrate L.A.’s status as a postcard, a fashion statement for Europeans, and the room was all white, with a hot tub on
a terrace and a view of the hills through the smog. He took her out for sushi in the Valley, and as they talked he saw she wasn’t acting only on her sister’s behalf: somewhere along the way, she’d stepped out of the costume drama that is English life, and now she couldn’t find her way in again.
After dinner was over, he took her up to Mulholland, to see the lights—Los Angeles always most enticing from a distance—and then they went down to the coast and followed it around, distant shouts reaching them as they drove past the arcade, the distant Ferris wheel, in Santa Monica. “It’s always most attractive if you treat it as a playground,” he said, and she looked over at him as he drove, not sure of what was coming over him.
He took the long way back, giving her the Anglo tour of Angeleno curiosities—the graveyards, the pink mansions and baroque leather bars—and when they pulled into the underground garage again, a liveried bellboy nodded them in, and the desk clerks, deft with this kind of situation, said “Miss Chancellor,” as if she were returning with a takeout meal. She yawned in the elevator, but it was a yawn that didn’t say “Leave me alone” so much as “Look at what I’m trusting you with.”
“I for one am not going to waste the tub,” she said when they got back into her suite, and he started to make himself busy with something he didn’t need to do. He heard her changing in the bathroom, and as she came out, “It’d be a crime not to use it. When I’m back in London, no one will believe . . .” and then the rest of it was lost as she stepped out onto the terrace.
He’d taken pains to say nothing about Camilla over dinner— Martine knew already, in any case, and it was too complex a story even for him to figure out—but now, as he saw she’d left the door open behind her, he thought of the small figure in her white dress somewhere in the city, asleep and at peace, hardly guessing that another woman, in her stoical way, was crying out for his company.