Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  Kelly's answer was, "I've never met a psychiatrist I couldn't out-think and out-reason; I'm not about to waste my time or my money on one of those cretins!"

  This Thursday gathering in Berkeley was an effort on Kelly's part to bring together people he considered intelligent enough to, as he put it, appreciate what he could teach them about using their minds effectively. I hoped it would all work out the way he wanted, but if it didn't, it wasn't going to be my problem.

  I was sitting close to the fireplace so I could blow my cigarette smoke in the general direction of the chimney and avoid offending non-smokers. These were the early days of the anti-smoking campaign and Berkeley, as usual, was ahead of everywhere else in making it a cause.

  You could still expect to find ashtrays in most homes in San Francisco and Marin County, but in Berkeley, you apologized for needing to smoke and let yourself out into the back yard until you'd done your little addiction thing and were ready to rejoin the free souls inside.

  By 8:00 PM, there were only four of us in the room: Kelly, myself and the person who lived in the house - a short, black-haired man in his early 40's with a seductive, lopsided grin, who translated ancient Chinese medical texts into English for the love of it, and was at the moment unemployed. The fourth was a very pretty woman, an attorney, who had been telling us wearily how it had recently come to her that she detested everything about the law, but that she couldn't decide what else to do with her life.

  By 8:15, two more people had arrived; a short blonde woman with a pale face and hesitant smile, and a man with angry eyes who was introduced as a psychologist. Then the door opened and in came a slender, very tall man whose hair was a thick Old Testament mane of silver, matched by a trim beard which had streaks of blond hair mixed in with the white. He was wearing brown corduroy pants and a worn corduroy jacket, and Kelly yelled out his name, "Doctor Alexander Borodin, people, known to his friends as Shura!"

  I must have been staring at the newcomer rather intently, because, as we were introduced, he met my gaze and lifted one large white eyebrow fractionally. Then he smiled as I patted the floor beside me. I'd heard just enough from Kelly about the man called Shura to be extremely curious. He'd said once, "Shura's the only person I've ever met - with the exception of Doctor Needleman - that I respect. He's a true, honest-to-God genius. He may even have a higher IQ

  than mine." He'd chuckled, and so had I. We both knew that Kelly found it hard to really believe in any IQ higher than his own, which was in the 170's. I had been intrigued by the admittedly faint possibility that a person who inspired respect in my difficult friend might actually turn up at the meeting. And anyone who rated equal seating, in Kelly's eyes, with the philosopher Jacob Needleman must be pretty remarkable, I thought.

  I watched the man with the gorgeous hair as he took off his jacket and sat down on the floor to my left. He hooked his arms around his knees and said, "Hello," his eyes clear blue and interested. I said in a low voice, "I'm honored to finally meet one of the two people in the world to whom Kelly does not apply the word, 'turkey'!"

  "Oh, really?" Shura looked sharply at me, then glanced over to where his host was animatedly talking to the blonde woman. "I suppose I should be flattered, but I hardly know him. Only met him a couple of times, at the Berkeley Brain Center. Don't know where he developed such regard for me." I grinned at the mention of what was usually referred to as the À, a very large and successful lecture and discussion group Kelly had taken me to a few times. Berkeley, like most university towns, was full of discussion groups continually being born and dying, and the À had lasted longer than most.

  I asked him, "What made you decide to come tonight, if you don't know Our Leader all that well?"

  "Oh, I had a free evening after my class on the U.C. campus, and thought I might stop in here instead of going straight home. Just curiosity. And I suppose I wasn't looking forward to home that much. Since my wife died, the evenings have sometimes been a bit too quiet."

  I said, "Oh, dear, how long ago did she die?" He said about a year ago, and I made a small sympathetic sound, thinking/ I wonder if it was a happy marriage. I changed the subject and asked if the class he referred to was one he was teaching, or was he a student? He said it was a class in Forensic Toxicology, and that he taught it every fall at the university.

  He's forgotten to ask who the other non-turkey is. Should I tell him?

  "Since you didn't ask," I said, "Kelly's only other hero is Jacob Needleman. You're in pretty good company."

  "Is that so?" He didn't have to say it; he wasn't familiar with the name.

  I chuckled, "That's okay. I don't know anything about him either, except that he's a philosopher and he's written some excellent books which I haven't read yet."

  During the break in the meeting, Shura and I took our cigarettes and coffee outside to the front porch and talked. I found out that he was a chemist and specialized in something called psychopharmacology, and that we knew a lot of the same people. He, too, had been to Esalen.

  He told me a story about a certain rather stolid psychiatrist whom I had also met, doing a handstand, stark naked, in one of Esalen's famous hot tubs, with an audience of the great and near-great, also naked but less ambitious, doing their best to avoid being swamped by the tidal wave. He said it was his favorite memory of Esalen. When I stopped laughing, I promised him an equally hilarious anecdote of my own about the hot tubs, at some future time. I was already looking forward to a future time. I liked this man, despite Kelly's approval of him.

  Somewhere along the way, I managed to make it clear to Shura that I had known Kelly for several months and that I was in the process of bringing closure, as gently as I could, to the relationship. It wasn't the right moment for details, and I didn't offer any.

  Shura said he had been married for 30 years and that his wife, Helen, had died of a stroke last year. When I asked him if he had children, he said there was one son, Theo, who was grown and living on his own, not far from the family home in the East Bay.

  I wonder what age range is "grown?" I can't tell how old this man is. The white hair says one thing, but the face and the way the body moves say something entirely different.

  When he asked, "How about you? Do you have children?" I took a deep breath and began, talking fast because Kelly was calling everyone back to the hard work of learning to think properly. "I'm divorced from a psychiatrist and I have four children, but the oldest, from my first marriage (I thought of adding that I was very young at the time - around five or so - but resisted the temptation) is living up north. He's a very good teacher in a private school and he has his own family."

  The word, "family," implies children, which means I'm a grandmother. So, okay. I'm a grandmother.

  I stubbed out my cigarette, "I live with my three teenagers in Marin County and we have a house across the street from my ex, so the kids just climb up the hill to their father's house on weekends and spend the time with him, and come back at the end of Sunday. It's a very civilized arrangement and I'm glad I managed to do it that way/ because it's paid off for everybody. I mean, my children haven't really had too bad a time with the divorce."

  I finished up at supersonic speed, "I work in a hospital as a medical transcriber and I hate the job but it's a living." I expelled a long breath, and Shura grinned. We returned to the living room.

  I'm glad I'm still reasonably attractive and I have lovely long hair, and thank God I lost weight last year and I'm a size 9. 1 want this man to be interested. No - make that fascinated.

  I liked him. I liked his face and the long, lean body; I liked the husky tenor voice and the way his eyes observed and the impression he gave of an open directness overlying something very inward, very private.

  When the meeting was over, we walked out of the house together and stopped on the sidewalk beside my old Volkswagon bus. I asked him if he planned to be at the next meeting, and it was then that I learned the rest of what I had to know.

  He said, "No, I'm afraid
I'm going to have to leave it at this one time, because I'm starting lessons in French next Thursday."

  "For any specific reason, or just to learn French?"

  "Well, I've always intended to learn French anyway, but right now there's a reason for trying to learn as much as I can in a very short time."

  He leaned back against my car, his arms folded, and the street light gave him a corona of orange-gold. His face was in shadow.

  "For the past year or so," he said, "I've been in a - a strange sort of relationship with a woman named Ursula, who lives in Germany. She was over here with her husband to study psychology and I fell in love with her, which was a bit inconvenient, since her husband is a person I like very much and consider a good friend, but it happened. It happened to both of us. I don't know how it's going to work out, but I'm going to meet her in Paris for a few days around Christmas, and we're going to try to figure out what to do. The French is because she speaks it fluently and I have a smattering of it and it's easier for me to improve what I have than to try learning German."

  I said the only thing I could, "Oh, I see." The Observer - my name for the part of me that keeps track of everything - noted with interest that there was suddenly a hollow feeling just below my rib cage. I smiled pleasantly at the shadowed face and said, "I hope it works out the way you want it to," not meaning a word of it.

  Just before I got into my car, I turned to him and put out a tendril, just in case.

  "When you get back," I said, "I'd love to know how it all turned out."

  I dug in my purse for the pen and small notebook I always carried, wrote my name and phone number and handed it to him. He took a large, worn wallet from the front pocket of his pants and carefully tucked the piece of paper into it.

  From the driver's window, I looked at the tall, brown-jacketed figure and said, "I'm very glad to have finally met you and I hope we meet again," speaking the ordinary, standard phrase slowly, with emphasis, as if it were the Open Sesame to treasure.

  Shura Borodin braced his hands on the edge of the car window, brought his head down to where he could look directly into my eyes, and said one quiet word, "Yes."

  A small shock went up my spine. I drove home, smiling for a long time. I didn't see him again for over two months. During that time, Kelly reluctantly packed up the assortment of things he'd kept at my house and, to my considerable surprise, said goodbye with a shy kiss on my forehead and an almost apologetic shrug, as if he realized that, this time, his usual tantrums would gain him nothing at all. I was touched and relieved and had all the locks changed the next morning.

  Then there was Christmas and everything that meant to me as a mother. Ann, Wendy and Brian were not only my children; they were also my only close friends. The divorce had made painfully clear that most of the people Walter and I had known during our marriage were going to remain attached to the partner with the medical degree and the social standing; apparently, it had not occurred to them to continue being friends with both of us.

  I had to work for a living; Walter's support payments were all he could afford, and they were not quite enough to cover the needs of three teenagers and the monthly bills as well.

  Ann, the older of my two girls, was - at age 17 - enjoying her new shapely figure, after years of misery with baby-fat. Wendy, one year younger, had also fought the bulge battle and won.

  The three of us had dieted together the year before until, finally, the day came for all of us to drive to the big shopping center up Highway 101, and walk together into a shop where they sold only blue jeans. While Brian sat waiting, the girls and I pulled on pants in sizes we had only dreamt of eight months earlier, and I bought a new pair for each of us, giggling at Brian's exaggerated look of boredom (he never had weight problems). Celebration day.

  So for Christmas, with the seductive credit cards I knew I should be avoiding, I bought some pretty, sexy clothes for my daughters. For Brian, my gentle, observant young son, I found an expensive sweater with an understated brown and blue pattern. Brian might be the youngest at 14, but he was no longer the baby; there was actually a shadow on his upper lip, which his sisters occasionally commented on, and he had a very definite taste in clothes, tending toward the simple and conservative. Suffering from a mild dyslexia, he had learned, when very young, to avoid the taunts and jeers of school bullies by being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, and I suspected that this was at least part of the reason for such understatement in his choice of what to wear.

  Ann and Wendy were bright, lovely-looking girls; each had thick blonde hair that fell in a straight, shining river to her buttocks. They had always complained bitterly when they were younger about the fact that Brian's darker hair had all the curls, but in high school their own falls of gold had earned them so much attention, they gradually lost the habit of curl-envy. I felt vindicated in having threatened them with banishment, execution or worse, if they so much as thought of cutting anything more than a split-end.

  They were kind, thoughtful people, my children, sensitive to the feelings of others, and patient with me as I struggled, not very efficiently, to keep both job and home going. I had always been a poor housekeeper, and suffered bouts of guilt when I realized how often the kids picked up after me. The only trouble they gave me was in a tendency to silly arguments with each other, like most siblings. They were just starting to outgrow this particular form of fun and games, to my great relief.

  I adored them, not just because they were my own, but because they were good human beings, people of integrity.

  On New Year's Eve, when the children had gone up the hill to be with their father, I went to a Mensa party in San Francisco, but returned home relatively early, wanting to face the first hours of the new year away from the noise and lurching of people who had drunk too much. I stood outside on the deck, in darkness, looking up at the star-frosted sky, letting myself feel without censoring the ache and hope that belonged to that night, and I sent out a prayer for connection with someone who would be - finally - the person I'd needed to be with all my life, someone who would have gone through his own changes and wars of the spirit and emerged a true adult. A grown-up man. Who wouldn't mind my being a grandmother, for Pete's sake. A man somewhat like Shura Borodin - or what Shura seemed to be.

  I cried a bit because the wanting was so very intense and the clear night sky so very indifferent, and everything I was in body and soul might yet grow old without a lover and friend who could be to me what I was capable of being to him. I toasted myself, hope, the new year and the magnificent cold stars with a bit of wine, then went to bed.

  Toward the end of January, I received a phone call from a woman I'd met several times at the À discussion group meetings, a sweet, flittering, childlike woman of 60-odd, who reminded me of a Hungarian countess my parents had known in Italy, when I was a child. Hilda even wore jewelry the same way the countess had, thin bird fingers glittering with rings, neck hung with numerous chains and pendants. She was the president of a psychology foundation whose name I could never quite remember, and she constantly fretted about the book for which she seemed to be forever gathering material.

  She was phoning to invite me to an evening at her home with her new discovery, " - an extraordinary spiritual teacher from India; you must meet him, my dear!" She urged me not to miss the performance of Indian music she had arranged for, and the company of what she assured me were, "The most wonderfully interesting people, very special people, darling!" I said to myself. Oh, why not, and to her, "Thank you, Hilda, it sounds absolutely irresistible." It was a Saturday night. When I entered Hilda's large living room, the first thing I saw was a magnificent dark red Persian rug and the second thing was Shura Borodin. He was standing at a large fireplace, resting one arm easily on the mantel, talking to three people whose backs were to me, two men and a woman. After the first shock of seeing him again, I found myself wondering where the German Ursula person was, not knowing what to look for - brown, black or blonde hair, although presumably it would b
e blonde - and I noted without amusement that my pulse rate had gone up considerably within the past few seconds.

  I searched around for other familiar faces to focus on; I didn't want to be caught looking at him. I thought, he might even have gotten married, then remembered he had told me Ursula was already married to a good friend (or former good friend), so that idea could be ditched.

  Maybe he's engaged. To hell with it. He never did call me, so Paris must have worked out the way he wanted, and if she's here, I'll find out soon enough.

  Hilda called the room to order, and invited her 25 or so guests to please form a half-circle, sitting on the pillows scattered around the floor. I sat down on a dark brown velvet pillow close to an archway, arranging my long skirt gracefully on the carpet, and reminded myself that, when I looked around to identify Shura and his German lady, I should do so very casually.

  Suddenly there was a body unfolding itself onto a large pillow next to me. It smelled warm and male and unaccountably familiar, and it was Shura. I smiled at him and said, "How good to see you again! Did you bring your German lady with you?"

  "No, I'm afraid it wasn't possible, this time."

  Oh hell, I meant to the party, not from Europe. Does he mean the same thing? Does he mean she's here in California, but didn't come to the party? Or that he couldn't bring her home with him from Paris?

  I tried again, "When did you get back?"

  "From France? Oh, about two weeks ago."

  "And it went well for you?"

  He didn't answer right away. I saw his profile, with its fine-bridged nose, as he squinted at the room. I waited, all my antennae on alert. After what seemed a very long time and was quite probably all of four seconds, he answered, "I really don't know."