by Marco Vassi
He felt extremely calm. The day's sitting had been particularly rewarding, the last two sessions given over to a practice called shikan taza in which all devices, even watching the breath, are put aside, and one does nothing but "strike the seat," assuming an attitude of permanence and nobility like that of a majestic pine. It required extraordinary concentration and after each session he was sweating heavily. But it had the effect of a steam bath, purging him of his poisons, returning him to a sense of himself, free of the turmoil of relationship.
He finished tidying up the room and Eleanor returned wearing a white kaftan. She made dinner without talking, tossing pots and pans about carelessly while he set the table. Her mood was testy. They ate in silence, a dinner of brown rice and steamed vegetables. He buried himself in a book while Eleanor fidgeted in her chair and sighed explosively from time to time.
When they finished, she went into the living room and turned on the television while he did the dishes. When he joined her she was sunk deep in the easy chair watching Captain Kirk impose the Federation's benign dictatorship on a people who didn't want to be bothered but ultimately had no choice. Larry sat on the couch and watched with her until the show was over.
He was torn between wanting to retreat to his room and finding out if something was really troubling Eleanor. If her mood were volatile enough, whatever he did would spark an explosion. If he left her for the evening she might accuse him of being uncaring, and if he did speak to her she might snap at him for meddling. And the morning's upheaval and his subsequent lapse from discipline was an experience he didn't want to repeat.
"Finished watching?" he said when the program finished.
She nodded.
"Mind some music?"
She shook her head.
He flicked off the television and put on some Mozart quintets, following the advice of a friend who was fond of saying that one can never go wrong with Mozart. As the music began to fill the space, Larry sat on the couch, curled his feet under him, and began reading again. His attitude was one of showing that he wanted to make contact, but was also ready to efface himself entirely for as long as that was necessary. It was a particularly gratifying role, that of the Attentive and Understanding Husband, and it reminded him of a time when they had spent silent evenings together without the need for any posturings.
As he read, the tension seeped out of the room, and after almost half an hour, Eleanor stirred. Her face was now relaxed and her eyes clear and warm. "Want some tea?" she asked.
"Sure."
They looked at one another and there was a palpable feeling of affection between them.
"How about a game of Scrabble?" she asked.
He smiled in a way that was special to such moments. The game was one of their sacred rituals, a totem that served as symbol for the fundamental meaning of their marriage. It had no more or less significance in itself than a communion wafer or a black pillow; its value came from what they invested it with, and how they honored its function. Offering to play was always a sign of complete cessation of any hostility and the dropping of all residual bad feeling. Accepting the offer meant that the other had wiped the slate clean also. Neither of them had ever betrayed the good faith of the ritual by using the safe space to recommence warfare.
Larry set up the board while Eleanor made tea, and by the time she was sitting across from him and the steaming cups were scenting the air, the room was cozy once more, now a nest for a man and woman who loved one another and were basking in the security of their hard-won relationship. In a marriage of any duration the sweetest moments are those when the two look at each other across the divide of the constantly yawning chasm that opens between them and find that they are still both there, still in contact and, against all odds, still bound in the embrace in which they discovered one another. This seemed one of those moments.
It was a scene so utterly perfect that it ran the risk of slipping into a parody of itself, the way Norman Rockwell's paintings hint at a well-masked dada sensibility underlying his vision. If Larry and Eleanor had been living a more normal married life, afterwards they'd have gone out to lie on their backs and look at the stars and be lost in the wonder of space in which all human aspirations, all the teachings of wise men and yearnings of soulful women, are seen as having no more importance than the sound of wind through the trees or the twitchings of the wings of a solitary butterfly among the flowers. Then they certainly would have made love on a rough blanket in the chill mountain air.
They sipped tea and spelled words and kept score and, at one point, Eleanor looked up with a mischievous smile and said, "You're going to hate me." When she said that it meant she had something like a Z on triple-letter square with the word itself perhaps counting for a double score. He was thirty-four points ahead but knew that the lead was temporary. Eleanor was a keen player and their lifetime record had her winning about sixty percent of the games.
His eyes played idly over her face as she looked down at her letters. She was, he realized again, an inordinately beautiful woman. The warmth of his feelings for her flushed through him as he recalled how long he'd known her and through how many changes. He was about to lean across the board to kiss her when some discrepancy in her appearance arrested his attention. He wasn't sure what it was, except that an intimation of horror caught at his belly, coupled with the kind of vertigo a person feels in a commonplace dream that's just about to turn into a nightmare. And just as he was about to take a breath, he saw what was different. The locket around Eleanor's throat was missing.
"Your locket," he said, his voice suddenly cracking.
It was a piece of jewelry he'd bought for her on their honeymoon, and there had not been a single day since then when she had not worn it. It fastened with a specially devised latch that could only be opened with a tiny key. He realized that he must have been aware earlier that she didn't have it on, but was only just now registering the fact. Seeing her without it was like seeing her without eyebrows.
Eleanor put her hand up to her throat. "The locket ...?" she repeated. "I don't know ... I'm sure I had it when ..." She broke off.
"When what?"
Eleanor looked away, over Larry's shoulder, her face a playing field of emotions. Then she looked back at him, her expression composed. "When I took my clothes off," she added.
Caught leaning forward about to kiss her, he drew back. "Do you want to tell me about it?" he asked, surprised at the timbre of composure in his voice.
To his amazement, she smiled. "Well, of course, darling," she replied, chattily, as though she were about to describe some shopping she'd done that day. "It was nothing. Part of the workshop today involved working in the nude."
His brain jammed. Expecting to be told the story of her infidelity, he was instead tossed an explanation that was at once more innocent and more outrageous than that. He found himself reacting more violently than if she'd actually described a torrid scene with another man.
"In the nude!" he shouted.
"Why yes," she said. "Don't tell me you're going to be shocked over a simple acting exercise. After all, there were fifteen people there. It's not as though I were alone with a man."
"You mean you took your clothes off in front of fifteen people!"
"Well they were all naked too."
Larry was off balance. His anger was directed not at what he was hearing, but at what he'd expected to hear. But since he couldn't make any reference to the latter, his feelings about the former were caught in a vise.
"What about Alec?" he shot out, wanting to find some target. "Was he naked too?"
"Why no," she answered, her tone registering surprise that Larry would even ask such a question.
"Well that must have been titillating for him, to have fifteen naked people cavorting in his living room."
"Oh for God's sake, Larry, Alec is in his sixties."
"What did you all do, touchy-feelies?"
Eleanor was about to reply, then hesitated, and smiled again, "Oh, you're
just being silly. I believe you're jealous. Which is very flattering after all the deadpan you've been practicing."
He felt the advantage slipping from him and he returned to his original question. "So what happened to the locket?"
A look of hurt came into Eleanor's eyes and her lower lip trembled, as though she were about to cry. "I don't know," she said. Larry stared at her. For the second time that day he had the feeling that she was acting, but acting badly, without her usual skill. "How can you not know!" he said.
"We ...," she began again, "We each had to stand alone in front of the group completely naked. And when it was my turn someone pointed out that I wasn't completely naked, that I had the locket on."
"That's idiotic," he interjected.
"Not really. That locket is more important to me than any piece of clothing I own and I knew that while I was wearing it I wasn't doing what Alec wanted, which was for each of us to stand without any defenses or identity in front of the others." Her eyes misted over. "Then, later, when we all got dressed, I must have forgotten to put it back on."
"Forgotten," he said, in a tone of voice a man might use whose wife forgot her baby in a shopping basket at the supermarket.
"It's got to be there," she said, her voice now louder, more strident. "I'll get it tomorrow. It's no big deal." She'd switched from sorrow to anger without missing a beat and Larry wondered once more if she were in some way toying with him.
"No," he said, injecting intimations of infinite sadness into his voice, "It's no big deal."
"Oh Larry," she moaned, all at once the essence of motherly concern. She got up, moved around the table that held the Scrabble board and knelt on the floor in front of him. She took his hands in hers and kissed his fingers. "I'm so sorry. I don't know how I could have done such a stupid thing. It's just that in the excitement ... well, I can't make excuses but please try to understand. I should never have taken it off, but when Roger pointed it out ..."
"Roger? Who's Roger?"
"One of the men in the group."
"That's right," he said, so low she could barely hear him. "The men in the group. It must have been nice for them."
Eleanor pulled away from him, stood up and walked over to the fireplace. She struck a pose of challenge, one hip forward. "It wasn't like that," she said.
"Wasn't it?" he said, his control slipping. He was at the edge where it is still possible to pull back from the emotion that was welling inside him, but he couldn't resist the plunge. He tasted anger and jealousy, feelings he'd not known for a long while and, like a longtime vegetarian sitting down to a steak, was surprised that his taste for such meat had not diminished. He got up from the couch and walked to the other side of the room, away from Eleanor, as though he were afraid that proximity might inspire violence. A sudden furious hunger for a cigarette stabbed at his chest. But when he turned to face her, out of the corner of his eye he saw an apparition that seemed as real as the wall he was leaning against, a black-robed monk sitting on the couch with his face buried in his hands. Larry blinked and stared, and the mirage resolved itself into shadows and bits of the furniture.
"What's wrong?" Eleanor asked, "You're face just went all white."
"What's wrong? I may be going mad, that's what's wrong. And your standing naked in front of a bunch of men isn't exactly what I need right now." A new thought kicked in. "But then they were naked too, weren't they. So you got to see how all the boys were hung."
"Right Larry," she said, and her voice was so calm, so rational, that it made him feel suddenly embarrassed. "That's what the exercise was for. To get us in touch with all the hidden sexual agendas, the agendas of excitement and shame. Alec walked up and down and told us to look, to stare. 'Drink it all in,' he said, And find out what you're really feeling. Are you turned on? Do you want to have an orgy? Or do you want to crawl into a closet and hide?' And he made us stay at it until we all came clean about what was going on inside us."
"So clean you forgot to put your locket back on."
"Oh God, Larry, I'm sorry," she cried out, and once more underwent a startling shift in mood. Again she was tearful. They stood facing each other for almost a minute, and then she went toward him, slowly, almost shyly. When she was close enough to touch him, she stroked his cheeks with her hands. "I know how much it means to you," she said, "But it isn't lost, I promise you."
He put his arms around her and held her tightly. He remembered the day they'd bought the locket, at a small shop in Paris, and the way the saleslady had smiled when she learned they were honeymooners. He could still see the scene in perfect detail, the locket lying on a dark blue satin cloth, the key next to it.
"The key," Larry thought. "The locket only comes off with a key."
There was no change in his body, in the way he held himself or embraced Eleanor, but his mind became cold and clear. Eleanor kept the key in a sandal-wood box on her dressing table, and if she had not known in advance that she would be asked to remove the locket during her acting exercise, she would not have brought the key with her. Which meant she couldn't have taken the locket off without snapping the chain, which he was certain she wouldn't have done.
"So she didn't leave it at Alec's class," he concluded.
In that instant of placid panic, Larry reached for whatever would comfort and sustain him, and recalled the zen teaching that whenever a thought arises, one should not be absorbed into its content but look to its source. All thoughts, pleasant and unpleasant, troubling and consoling, should be treated equally, merely as manifestations of mind, and it was to mind itself that one should pay attention.
He removed his arms from around her back, squeezed her shoulders once, and smiled at her. "You're right," he said. "I'm being foolish. Of course it'll turn up tomorrow."
She kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Why don't I make some more tea, and then we can finish the game. I'm going to beat you, you know."
"We'll see about that," he replied.
She went into the kitchen and Larry sat back down in the easy chair. He wanted a cigarette very badly now, but there was nothing for it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, the vein in his temple throbbing again. This was the first time that the ritual of their board game had been marred and by something that had the impact of a terrorist bomb in a restaurant. He took several deep breaths and then felt a palpable click in his mind. At once, the screen on which he'd seen the images that morning lit up, and again he saw the man's hand. He let out a small whimper when he realized that it was the same hand, that he recognized it. But this time it was not at Eleanor's waist, it was at her throat.
"What's this?" he asks, fingering the locket.
"Something Larry gave me on my honeymoon."
"Take it off."
"Why."
"I don't want anything of his on you when you make love to me."
"He'll notice if I don't have it on. He's not that dizzy."
"You can put it back on when you leave here. If you leave here. Why even go back to him?"
"I promised him the summer. I owe him that."
"So long as he's not touching you."
"No worry about that."
The hand moves down then, brushing over Eleanor's breasts, stopping, cupping them one at a time, squeezing, and then taking one nipple between thumb and index finger, pinching. Eleanor gasps, then sighs.
"Take it off now."
"I can't. It only opens with a key. I don't want to break it."
"Next time, bring the key."
"Yes."
Larry opened his eyes. It was clear to him that today had been that next time. Eleanor had brought the key with her, opened the locket, and when she left, made forgetful by passion, had driven off without it. But even as he accepted the accuracy of that conclusion, he realized that the whole idea might be a form of hallucination. Would Eleanor invent a story about a nude acting exercise, something that Larry could check on very easily? Of course, he'd never followed her tracks before and she could assume he wouldn't do t
hat now.
He shook his head. As possibility and probability intertwined and faced off, he wondered why he was caught up in such a melodrama to begin with. He contrasted his current state to what he'd felt after his last sessions of sitting earlier in the day. That was all lightness and golden awareness, laced with clean, intense concentration. This was darkness in turmoil and a beckoning ambiguity.
"Can there be something to the idea that a woman is an impediment to a man's realization?" he thought. He remembered one of the first arguments he and Eleanor had had about Buddhism. He'd given her some books to read and her response had been to point out the overwhelming male prejudice in it and the derogatory statements made about women. Larry defended the offending patriarchs and masters, claiming that they were just using the idiom of their time. But he had no satisfactory reply to Eleanor's question as to why supposedly enlightened men didn't rise above the prejudices of their historical period.
He rubbed his eyes and sat up straight at the edge of the chair. Whatever the truth of these matters, the one thing he didn't want was a recurrence of the erotic images that had already seized his mind several times. He knew that if they were indeed makyo, he would have to endure them, and worse, before he broke through the blockade they represented. And he decided he had to have a reality check before he encountered those demons again.
Eleanor walked back into the room, carrying the teapot. Larry looked over at her and smiled. "Ready to be beat?" she said.
"How do you know I didn't look at your letters while you were gone?"
"Because I know you don't cheat." She sat on the couch and poured their tea. "And besides," she continued, "It wouldn't help you anyway. I'm still going to make the same score."
"O.K.," he said, "Let's see what you've got. And then, casually, offhandedly, asked, "By the way, how did you get it off?"
"Get what off?"
"The locket."
"Why with the key, of course."
"But don't you keep that in that trinket box of yours?"
"Not for a long time. I used to take the locket off when I went to the gym, especially when I got a massage. I started carrying the key with me in my purse and since we moved here haven't got around to putting it back in the box. It's a lucky thing too. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do the complete exercise today." She gazed at him quizzically for a few seconds. "What have you been thinking?" she said, smiling at him brightly.