by Marco Vassi
"What's up?" she asked. "First you're late to breakfast and now you're being glum. I must admit it's a relief from your usual morning mania, but is anything wrong?"
Again the temptation to ask, but the question froze on his lips. It suddenly seemed that it would sound silly to bring it up. What could he say? "See here, I want to know why your panties are torn." And then, abruptly, the spell lifted. He realized that if she did have something to hide the last thing she would do is put the evidence on display. Doubtless there was a simple explanation, and he decided not to inject a potentially awkward or ugly note into the atmosphere because he'd gone a little loony in the bathroom. Relief rippled through him. He smiled.
"No nothing," he replied. "Just some murky thoughts." He looked over at her. She was sipping her coffee. The sun's angle had shifted, altering the color and intensity of the light. Now it was less bombastic, and bathed the wood-paneled walls of the kitchen with a soft golden glow. Eleanor seemed surrounded by an aura. Her face was relaxed, the expression inward. Her beauty transfixed him for a moment, like that of a goddess appearing to distract a pious monk.
She felt the weight of his look and glanced at him, her eyes tender. "Dear Larry," she whispered and held her hand out toward him. Their fingers touched and he felt the current pass between them.
"An all-day session?" he said.
Eleanor turned her head abruptly to look at the wall clock. The electricity between their fingers stopped as suddenly as the extinction of a bulb when the switch is thrown. The moment that had just passed was the very breath of their marriage. As long as they had that contact, the relationship lived. In it they affirmed the pristine glimpse of the selves they had been when they first fell in love. Now he was aware of its fragility and of a quality in Eleanor he'd never seen before. When she removed her hand from his there was no trace of the lingering disengagement from that contact he'd always cherished.
"Hate to eat and run," she said lightly, standing up.
Off guard, he turned peevish. "Yes, you mustn't keep the great Mr. Moorman waiting."
She cocked her head, like someone hard of hearing, then faced him, her eyes opaque. "Mr. Moorman is waiting for me," she said, "Whereas you, I believe, have a date with a pillow."
His eyes narrowed and several seconds of dangerous silence passed. Then, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, Eleanor passed her hand over her forehead and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you." Larry stared at her. The quality of delivery, the mechanical nature of the gesture, was something he could not describe in any other way but to call it bad acting. And Eleanor had never "acted" with him, or if she had, it had been good enough to get by him.
To his astonishment, she went on in the same vein. "I guess it's just the pressure we're both feeling to find out whether this summer is going to work for us. And you seem so distant from me, so unreal."
He didn't know what her game was, if any, and his reply was tentative, probing. "I find it ironic that an actress would make a comment about someone else's unreality."
Abruptly as she'd stepped into role, she stepped out, and the Eleanor who replied was her normal self. "I know what's real," she said. "When my tooth hurts I see a dentist. When it's raining I use an umbrella. When I look at stars at night I remember that everything's a mystery. What's the big deal?"
Larry looked at her quizzically. Her paraphrase of a master's famous definition of zen—"When I'm hungry, I eat; when I'm tired, I sleep"—perplexed him. He wasn't sure whether she'd read the line at some time and was now consciously playing on it, or whether her words were spontaneous. He had the distinct sense that she was somehow toying with him. Eleanor gazed back at him. "Why, Larry? Why do you have to sit on a pillow to find out what's real?"
The question, put so bluntly and in that context, left him momentarily speechless, although at another time he would have been able to reel off the five levels of awareness in sitting, and state the zen goal of having no goal, when the sitting is an end in itself. He shook his head, and Eleanor glanced at the clock again. "I'm sorry," she said, "But I really have to go." The apology had the ring of sincerity. "And I'm a little on edge," she went on. "Alec is heating up the training and it's taking its toll." She kissed him on the forehead. "Bye," she said, and walked out the front door.
Larry watched her go, noting how tightly the jeans clung to her buttocks, making her appear more naked than if she had worn nothing at all. He sat unmoving until he heard the car engine start, and with it a sudden crashing where a startled deer broke from behind a tree and ran into the woods. Then the crunch of tires on twigs and shale, and the rocking audible progress of the automobile down the hill.
With the departure of the machine, the woods returned to its own sounds, and within a few minutes Larry felt its spirit reassert itself. Like a fade-dissolve in a film, the image of Eleanor slowly disappeared as did all the questions and problems she represented for him. At such times Larry wondered how men got to assume the role of the movers and shakers of society. He saw Eleanor as a fierce vortex of implacable energy, and himself as a kind of litmus paper reacting to her influence. He wondered what she was feeling as she drove away from him, whether she was relieved at cutting loose from his relative stolidity and flinging herself into the world of action.
"What are we doing together?" he wondered.
It was his habit to take a brief walk after breakfast before beginning the second round of sitting, but this day had unsettled him enough to make him want to change his routine. He fixed a second cup of tea, then went into the living room where he dug out his secret cache of cigarettes. A year earlier, he and Eleanor had decided to give up smoking. He had stayed off almost a month and then found himself at a friend's house one night unable to refuse the offer of a smoke. The following morning he discovered that the habit was back. Eleanor had stayed off and he couldn't admit his failure to her. He could hear her, at key points in any argument, cutting him with, “Well, if you can't give up something as simple as smoking, I don't see how much good sitting on a pillow is doing you." So he became a secret smoker.
It was a role he found he enjoyed. The undercover vice made him feel like a man having an affair and successfully hiding it. In the cabin, he kept his stash in a classically obvious place, thrown carelessly in the back of the middle drawer of a writing desk which neither of them used. If she did happen upon the current pack one day, he could always feign surprise and suppose that it had been left by the people they'd rented from.
Now he drew a cigarette out, settled himself on the sofa with his tea nearby, lit up, and lay back to enjoy the sensations of smoking and sinning. Larry had been raised a Catholic and even though he'd intellectually outgrown its strictures, the training still shaped his emotional life, especially the pleasure of taking a bite of forbidden fruit. After trying to cleanse himself through therapy and LSD he realized that he would never be able to undo completely the conditioning that the church had wired into him and suspected he would always feel off-balance until he found a substitute.
Buddhism filled the bill perfectly. The Void was far superior to Jehovah as an absolute, Buddha far more rational than Jesus, and enlightenment more dignified than salvation. There was a world of difference between the lofty, transpersonal psychology of Buddhism and the cramped, fear-ridded dogmatics of Catholicism. Sitting zazen was formally the same as kneeling in prayer except that it was not done to curry favor with a petulant deity but to learn the realities of one's own character.
Larry sucked the smoke into his lungs, enjoying the searing sensation, the hint of pain, and the taste exploding raucously on his tongue. He blew the smoke out slowly, watching the yellow-white clouds expand in the air. Shifting his sense of scale, he imagined the shapes to be of enormous size, mile-long formations scudding with ponderous majesty across a vast horizon.
The question of why he and Eleanor were together now returned, but at a distance, like one of the smoke clouds drifting across the room. They'd fallen in love, which is to
say, his desire had been aroused, and satisfied, and wanted more. He hadn't wanted to let go of her and marriage was the obvious way to hold on. Also, he'd reached an age and a place in his career where a wife and family made sense. And all of this was suffused with an unexamined romanticism, a yearning for the tantric union, the erotic transcendence.
They'd gone to bed together the night of the first day they met, and Larry shifted his weight on the couch as he thought of it. The cigarette had burned down to a stub and he ground it out in the saucer holding the tea cup. He sat back, his hands cupped behind his head, and drifted into a reverie. By now he would ordinarily have finished his walk and be sitting again, but the brief spell of renegade activity was proving too pleasant to terminate.
Larry had met her at his bookshop. She'd bought a very expensive book on mime and the following day, going over his receipts, Larry asked the manager who had bought the book. "A real looker," the manager replied. "If she comes in again, let me know," Larry told him, and was surprised when, a few hours later, there was a knock on his office door and Eleanor walked in.
"You wanted to see me?" she asked. She was stunning in tight black slacks and a black turtleneck shirt, the vitality and sensuality of her body overwhelming the tiny space. His visceral reaction was to want to jump up and run his hands over her a thousand times. The feeling flashed in his eyes and she hesitated a few seconds before stepping all the way into the room.
"I was curious," he said. "That book's been on the shelf for two years and I wondered who finally picked it up. Mel told me you were a looker and that made me even more interested in meeting you."
"A looker?" she said, her tone arch but her smile wry.
"It's a feeble word," he replied, "To describe you."
"And? Is your curiosity satisfied?"
"No. Now I want to know more about you. Forever."
She laughed. "You bookstore guys really have a line," she said.
Finally, she came all the way into the room and sat down. They talked, but the words were unimportant. The chemistry was there, that unmistakable agitation of molecules and atoms changing the balance in the blood and the homeostatic humming of the brain. As she put it some ten hours later, "It's not too often I get the urge to wrap myself around a man I've just met, but the minute I saw you I knew it was going to happen."
"And you didn't play coy."
"I'm an avant-garde actress, I don't do dated roles."
It was just about six months before they came up for air, and then the realization, always right beneath the surface, that the sheer hunger for one another's bodies and life stories had to be sustained by something broader, more social. Perhaps, it might be argued, that that is the point in any affair when the parties ought to kiss one last time, smile sadly, and pay homage to the truth of transience as the ultimate principle of existence. But they were in no mood for philosophical perspectives. They were torn between the still compelling vibration of first heat and the not yet crystallized bond of full union. They toyed with a score of fantasies, such as giving up business and career and going to find a tropical island, or living in Nepal, or simply moving to San Fransisco to plant their passion in a different soil away from all the familiar roots of family and friends and childhood city streets, to play Adam and Eve again, the first couple on Earth, capable of creating a new world.
In those early euphoric days of constant hand holding, of impatience when they were apart for more than a few hours, they might have made the leap, daring destiny with their love. But they slipped back into consensual reality, and he was drawn back into the orbit of his work and she into her classes and tryouts and performances. The magic was transformed into responsibility, and the wild flights of fancy were turned into sensible arcs of overlapping routines. In short, they settled down, honoring the flame of early passion by tending the home fire of affection, and when their eyes and fingers met from time to time with a special feeling, it was like laying a wreath on a monument to memory.
After their marriage, Larry had not seriously been tempted by another woman. He knew that a brief affair would produce only sparks, and that didn't interest him. A serious affair would produce another cycle such as he'd gone through with Eleanor, and he was unwilling to risk those kinds of waves in his life. Also, the idea of having a child with Eleanor kept his lust focused. And so as relatively mild as their marriage and lovemaking became, Larry remained content. Until the wild soul of zen sang to him and captured his mind and, increasingly, his body. Then Eleanor had a rival, and not in the form of a woman. The thought of Eleanor's being unfaithful had never occurred to him, not until this morning.
He lit a second cigarette and sipped the last of the tea. He was frowning again. "All right," he said out loud. "Do I believe that Eleanor is seeing someone?" He was silent for several puffs and his brow cleared. "No," he continued, "The question is: do I want to believe that Eleanor is seeing someone?"
Having made the distinction, he realized that all his concern of the day masked a more fundamental issue, which was what was his real intention for September. He and Eleanor had agreed that the summer was to be a trial period, giving them a space in which to make a mature decision in the Fall, but he had not really faced the possibility of separation, at which point Eleanor would indeed be sleeping with other men. The idea of that was painful, yet he couldn't mask the fact that a large part of him wanted out of the struggle, wanted to go to the zen monastery in Monroe, just fifty miles from where he now sat, and devote the rest of his life to peaceful contemplation and study. He saw quite clearly that if Eleanor were indeed now having an affair with someone, the decision would have been made for him.
The analysis was accurate, but the information was still skimpy. The whole thing might be nothing more than a kind of hallucination arising from the combination of intensive meditation and celibacy. He felt a vein in his temple throb. Having two cigarettes in a row threatened to give him a headache and he put out the second one and sank back onto the couch with his eyes closed. However, he hadn't had more than a few seconds to take a deep breath when the projector in his brain started throwing images on the screen of his mind again.
This time there were no stills. He saw Eleanor as she'd been when she left a while earlier, only instead of driving to Alec's she is going through town, toward Saugerties. She turns off on one of the side roads and stops in front of a two-storey house. The front door opens. A man walks out. He is in his early forties, vaguely European looking. Eleanor runs toward him. He puts his arms around her. One hand slides down to her waist, below her waist, cups her buttocks.
Larry opened his eyes and stared fiercely at the ceiling, but the film continued inside his skull, under the dome of his shaved head, even as he watched a fly walk upside down across one of the wooden beams holding up the ceiling. Now the man is lying on a bed, naked. Eleanor is stretched out on top of him, wearing only her panties. Her face is buried in his crotch. A close-up. Her lips are stretched taut around the thick veined phallus. It is pulsing. The sperm is spurting out. Eleanor is sucking, swallowing, making muffled whimpering sounds.
Larry sat bolt upright, his face contorted. He was at the limits of his capacity to absorb the fantasy. But the images were out of control. The mental power he'd accumulated from so much sitting was far stronger than he'd realized. His mind was like a rapidly overheating nuclear reactor.
He stood up and walked to the front door, wanting to get outside, but the images only grew sharper. This time Eleanor and her phantom lover are embracing tightly. She is pushing herself against him, grinding, kissing him hotly, wetly. His hand slides down. His fingers are impatient. He pulls and yanks, and the panties tear. The both look down, astonished. And then they laugh. Eleanor reaches down and takes them off.
"I'd better be careful," she says. "My husband is pretty unconscious but he isn't completely in a coma yet."
"Why don't you leave them on his zen pillow," the man says. "That might wake him up."
Larry flung open the door an
d stepped into the bright morning sunlight. At once he felt better. The pictures in his mind faded. He looked at his hands and realized his fingers had been trembling. He leaned against a tree and felt the perspiration drying on his forehead.
"So that's what they mean when they talk about the power of makyo," he thought. "I never imagined it could be so fierce." And then he grinned, for it suddenly occurred to him that the whole episode was nothing other than proof that his practice was bearing fruit, that the zen-induced crisis of doubt was beginning to pervade his entire system. And he saw the logic of the unconscious mind's choosing Eleanor as the symbolic demon.
As he went back indoors, he concluded that there was no point in continuing to wonder about Eleanor's fidelity. She was or she wasn't, and he'd find out or he wouldn't. The important thing was to concentrate on his work. He picked up the teacup and saucer and took them into the kitchen to wash them, and then went out to the woodshed which he'd fixed up for meditation.
It held nothing but a mat and pillow, incense holder, gong, and a small statue of Buddha. He lit a stick of incense, did nine prostrations, and sat on his pillow. He swayed back and forth until he found his balance, then struck the gong three times. And by the time the vibrations had died down, he was in the correct posture, legs folded in full lotus, hands cupped below his navel, spine erect, eyes lidded, his awareness on the breath moving in and out of his lungs.
Larry continued another day of sitting, following a tradition that had been going on unbroken for at least two and a half thousand years.
3
Larry was sweeping the kitchen floor when Eleanor returned. She nodded her hello and without a word went into the bathroom to shower. He recognized her mood. She was irritable and edgy, a state which, in the old days, Larry would have transformed by making love to her. Now he just watched her sweep past, as he would storm clouds sailing past a distant mountain top.