When we finished eating, Joey stood up and made his way to the bathroom in the back. His presence seemed to linger at the table, that safety, that same feeling of being watched by a protection that would allow no ill to befall me.
As we left the café, Joey turned to me, just for a moment, and looked directly into my eyes. Without words, his look transfixed. I almost collapsed onto the pavement with its authority. His eyes seemed to ask, “Are you really ready? Are you serious? When I take you to the cliff’s edge, will you really jump with me?”
“All is well,” he spoke. “You are doing very well. It is unfolding as it should. Come tonight.” With that he turned and walked the few steps, opened the door off the street, and was gone, up the faded staircase and into his sanctuary.
CHAPTER 10
UNKNOWN WATERS
I wandered the university district, filling time before the meeting. The feeling of protection and safety continued to envelop me. I was sobered now, no longer elated from notions of spiritual attainment. I was entering an unknown world where every familiar map and habitual strategy could no longer help me. I walked the streets in a daze. I was now faced with a world neither populated by hungry demons nor celestial beings, things just as they are. No meaning.
I came to the colorfully decorated shop window of Mysterium, which proudly announced itself to be the city’s largest spiritual bookstore. The window offered me ten steps to financial freedom, the final truth on what makes men and women really get along, and ancient secrets of longevity. None of it had much of a hook. I was wandering in the hinterland, surrounded by a people whose ways were unfamiliar. With nothing else to do, I pushed open the bookstore’s glass door. Here was a virtually infinite supply of tools for better living, many of them by authors I had hosted on my show not long before. I browsed the shelves. There was a longing in my heart, but for none of this. For something else. Something which words could not name, but my heart would not leave alone.
Then I saw the eyes. At first I was shocked, they seemed to be Joey’s eyes, but looking out from a different face. An Indian face with a beard. I took the book from the shelf. It was the same face that I had seen on the table in Joey’s room. It was his old man. There was a sofa at the back of the bookstore provided for patrons like me with time to kill. I opened the book at random.
“There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality, though in fact we are reality.” A wave of relief swept over me, although I was not sure if I even understood what I was reading.
A woman was perusing the occult section with a man who worked there, looking for a book on Scottish Kabbalism. My vision became wide, it took in everything at once.
“The mind, turned outwards, results in thoughts and objects. Turned inward it becomes itself the Self … ” I closed my eyes. What would happen if I turned my mind inward on itself? The first few times my mind just did a somersault and arrived at a conceptual conclusion: I am consciousness. I am the witness. Cute. Empty. This was like trying to hold on to a slippery eel. Then after about five minutes, there was just a moment of pure looking, pure seeking for itself. Everything became still.
I opened my eyes. A middle-aged man was speaking earnestly with a girl in her 20s about the comparative merits of different translations of Rumi. He was doing everything he could to hide his obvious deeper carnal intentions.
“Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one’s being.” I got ensnared in that for a while.
I watched a boy of no more than five picking out a statue with his mother. He loved every one, and with each new choice, his mother would agree completely. It was a gift for Daddy. I felt a wincing below my ribs, and closed my eyes.
As I lingered with the pain a while, I could feel how much I did not want it to be like this. A whisper from nowhere said surrender. As I relaxed into welcoming pain, just like this, it melted like ice, and there was just the resting.
“Only if one knows the truth of love will the strongly entangled knot of life be untied … ”
A good two hours passed in this way. I must have read virtually every word, but not in sequential order. I would dip in and then stop, intoxicated by the power of what I was reading. When I looked at my watch, I was astounded by how much time had passed. I had just enough money in my pocket to buy the book, still leaving a dollar for the bus. I walked out with it in my pocket, back into the city’s twilight. Joey’s words and his teacher’s words seemed to melt together into one calm certainty that brought me back, always, to my Saturday afternoons on the beach. I wandered some more, my hand in my jacket pocket, clasping the book like a raft in choppy waters.
As I turned the corner, onto Pine Street, a familiar face greeted me. Sam was walking in my direction with a grocery bag cradled against each breast, two French loaves poking out of one bag like rabbit ears. She looked startled.
“Where are you going?” she asked me softly, studying the sidewalk, as though she had dropped a speck of gold dust there.
“Um, nowhere, I’m just waiting till it’s time to go to Joey’s.” My belly tensed. It seemed I could feel Sam’s body underneath her clothes. Did we make love, or did I dream it?
She tightened her lip, and withdrew just for a moment, like a cat still uncertain if I was friend or foe. “Well, do you want to eat something before the meeting starts?” she asked a lamppost.
The tightness in my solar plexus suddenly exploded in my chest, as if she had asked me if I’d like to move to Hawaii with her, have babies, and start a new life.
“Oh God, I’d love to,” I blurted. I took a breath. “That would be nice.”
She laughed. “So let’s go.”
I took one of her grocery bags and followed her across the street. Only then did I notice we were having this conversation across from the entrance to her building. Back in the industrial elevator she studied the bare wooden floorboards during the five flights of its ascent. I was learning now not to take this personally; it was her default setting. As we stepped back into her apartment, the memory of the dream swept over me again. I wanted to tell her all about it, but I knew that any hope of a relaxed dinner would be abandoned in the process.
She disappeared into the shower, leaving me with Van Morrison forcefully asking me, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” Would that I had his courage and directness with my dinner host. I realized now that Sam’s entire life took place to a soundtrack; even when she visited me in my dreams, she managed to activate the hi-fi in my sleep world. As she moved from bathroom to alcove in her white bathrobe, I had to look away. I was overwhelmed with the memory of the previous night.
She reappeared in a turquoise sweat suit. Her feet were pink and naked; I was consumed with the thought of sucking her toes. I looked out the window in embarrassment.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Um,” I replied. “Sure.” I crossed my arms over my chest and huddled a little. I felt transparent.
And so, to the accompaniment of a CD player on endless auto-shuffle, we chopped carrots and potatoes together into tiny cubes, as she prepared minestrone soup. Rebecca had cooked this dish many times; it seems to be to Italians what clam chowder is to Bostonians. But this was beyond cooking; this was more of an art form I was observing. Sam treated each vegetable with the care of a lover; her sauté style was as though she was massaging the naked tomatoes and their friends in warm oil.
We sat down with our bowls of minestrone, French bread, Parmesan cheese, and a spinach salad. She was relaxed now, laughing, as though we had been dining together for eternity. She started to ask me more about my life, filling in the pieces from the clues I had delivered at Joey’s meeting on the first night. When we got to the children, her eyes lit up.
“Do you have pictures?” she asked. I delivered tattered offerings from the wallet in my back pocket.
“Oh, they’re beautiful,” she cooed. “They’re so beautiful. You must miss them.”
“I do. It’s true,” I replied.
> “Will you be with them for Christmas?” she asked. It was only a few days away.
“No, I can’t this year,” I muttered. “They’re with my wife in Chicago, and I’m not really welcome there.”
“I’m so sorry,” she replied. “I’m really sorry.”
In the moments of silence that followed, I could sense her feeling with me.
“It will be okay,” she said softly. “Everything will be okay. Once Joey takes you on, everything works out.”
That was the knowledge I had rested in all afternoon.
She told me a little about herself, but it was in fragments. She taught yoga in a local studio on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday mornings and worked in the late-night café where I had met her, to fill out her income. If I tried to turn the subject to her past or anything more personal, she became quiet and changed the subject immediately.
By the time we’d finished eating and were washing the dishes, Enya was celebrating with us in song that on her way home she was committed to remember only good things. It was time to go. As we walked the few blocks to Joey’s, Sam put her hand through the crook of my arm. My chest tightened as we ascended the faded stairs. I hid my pride behind a nonchalant exterior. We were together now.
The same regulars were there as on the first night, with the addition of a stocky-looking woman who must have been in her mid-50s. She sat erect, looking mildly discontented with everything. She reminded me of someone I didn’t like at all, but I couldn’t remember who it was. It became increasingly difficult to sit in the room without noticing her. She was like an itchy substance on my skin. Then Joey came and sat. I felt defiant. I was sitting next to Sam now. What was he going to make of that?
After sitting in silence together for a while, Roy, the owner of the artsy cinema, asked Joey a question about creativity. A long discussion ensued. Then the Austrian psychotherapist, Maryanne, asked him about being of service. In the midst of his long answer I remember him saying, “Real love only gives; it seeks for nothing in return. Real love can only arise from knowing who you are. When you recognize your own self to be limitless, then there is no sense of lack, no sense of limitation, there is only giving. If you perceive yourself to be small, limited, only a name and a form, there must always be lack, always need, always a feeling of something missing. When the heart is awake, it overflows. When it sleeps, it lives in acquisition.” As he finished, he looked at me, making his big blue eyes even bigger than usual.
When the meeting ended and Joey had left, Alan stood up, cleared his throat theatrically, and announced that there would be no meetings for several days, due to the Christmas season. Sam had put her shoes on and slipped away before I had time to notice. I followed down the stairs in hot pursuit, but resigned myself to walking to the bus stop alone. There was a longing in my heart, and that now familiar tightening below my rib cage, but just as in the afternoon, everything was contained in an ocean of protection, a feeling that defied understanding.
I walked the few blocks to the bus stop. Soon the bus came, with the same driver as two nights before. We exchanged a grin and I took my seat. Sitting opposite me was a black woman, her little boy asleep on her lap. I could feel from the look on her face, and the way she held her body, that she was exhausted, bewildered by her fate; that her feet hurt. She would probably never know the feeling of a couple of weeks off in Hawaii; her sense of struggle would probably only lift once the confusion of her life was done. Her exhaustion was my own. There was only the drudgery of it all. When she looked back at me, her eyes told me she wanted to be left alone.
My gaze shifted to a teenage boy slumped back in his seat, long gangly legs cumulating in large worn sneakers, hair completely shaved off on one side and left unkempt on the other. He was chewing gum, immersing himself in the luxury of not needing to care about anything. I sank into my own seat and stared out the window.
This was neither the universe of doom I’d walked through the night before I met Joey, nor was it the universe of rapture the night I met him. Reality was shifting constantly; nothing had any solidity.
I was home by 11 P.M. Paul’s light was on. I went straight to his door.
“Well, well, well,” he greeted me, a twinkle in his eye. “Someone didn’t come home last night.” He switched off the footage of Detroit traffic in rush hour.
We sat on his tattered brown couch. This was going to be difficult. “Okay, so?” he asked. “The suspense is killing me.”
“I can’t explain, Paul,” I said. Then I remembered the book in my pocket. “I bought a book today.” Long pause, he was waiting. “You know, nothing is the way it seems.”
“Never mind books,” he said. “What about the girl?”
“Well,” I replied. “Yes, I ended up staying at her place last night.”
“Ho ho ho. That’s my boy. No wonder you’re feeling better.”
“But that’s not it, Paul,” I interrupted. “It’s not about the girl. And yet it is about the girl. Everything’s different than it seems to be.”
Paul was looking impatient. “Cut the crap, Matt. What happened? Did you … ,” he paused dramatically, and changed his voice, “have a good time?”
“I slept on her couch, Paul. But it’s not that. There’s something this guy is showing me that makes everything different.”
Paul was looking even more impatient. “For God’s sake, Matt. You’ve had a terrible time lately. You’ve met a beautiful girl, and you’re talking to me about an old man. What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s not the girl, Paul,” was all I could say. “Yes, I like her, but that’s what I’ve always done. Chased after a girl or a job or something. There’s something else happening that I can’t explain. It’s when I let go of the girl that the peace comes. And when I let go, the girl appears. It’s when I chase the girl that things get difficult.” Our eyes met, I felt a roar arising from my belly. “It’s the same for all of us, Paul. It’s the chasing that pushes everything away.” Whatever was speaking, it was talking to me as much as to Paul. I saw that his heart understood even as he was simultaneously oblivious. In the briefest window, out of time, we both knew. Then he looked away.
“You’re crazy, man. You’ve always been crazy,” he laughed. “Just get the girl. You’ll feel better, you’ll get your job back, and all will be fine.”
A thought machine was talking, based in habit, based in what it had been taught to think. It wasn’t his thought machine, it wasn’t mine, it was everyone’s. It was the thought machine, which keeps telling us to chase after dead ends. I could say nothing to that machine to convince it. Yet I could see that Paul’s heart already knew what I knew, just had no way to trust itself. I recognized the futility of convincing him, and abandoned the effort.
“You’re right. She’s beautiful, I’m smitten, and I know it’s going to work out great,” I grinned.
“That’s my boy,” the machine responded.
“Want to meet her?” I asked. The words came out of nowhere, surprising even me.
“Of course,” he replied, automatically.
“Great. Well the next time I go over to Joey’s, she’s bound to be there, so come along, too.”
He hesitated, the machine sensing it might meet its demise. “Okay. I’ll come,” he laughed. “But believe me, my eyes are going to be on the girl, not on your old man.”
CHAPTER 11
THE YOGA CLASS
When I finally fell asleep that night, Sam and Rebecca and every other woman I had ever known were merging in and out of each other. I was on the threshold, equally pulled by desire and transcendence.
By the time morning came, I had fallen asleep and woken up again many times. The fire in my chest and the tension in my solar plexus were becoming unbearable, but I no longer knew what I was longing for. It wasn’t exactly for Sam, and yet it was her, too. It wasn’t exactly returning to the bliss of the first night with Joey, and yet it was that, too. It wasn’t exactly having things back the way that they had been, and
it was that, too. I lay in bed for a long time, caught in the inevitability of just not knowing. An aerial view of Machu Pichu, courtesy of National Geographic, seemed to advocate transcendence, while the market scene from a town in Northern Thailand next to it reminded me there was no escape from the reality of the world. I couldn’t go back, yet I had no idea what going forward meant; it was out of my hands.
Sometime after nine, I went back down to Paul’s apartment to beg the use of his shower. I opened the door, and he just called out to go ahead. While I was getting dressed again and shaving, I heard Paul’s phone ring; as I came back into the living room he was sitting in his bathrobe sipping coffee.
“Your old man called,” he said. “He wants you to go over to his place about four o’clock.”
“Oh, I gave him your number. I’m sorry.” Paul said nothing, just scratched himself and messed with something on a shelf.
Wednesday, no evening meeting. Paul and I drank instant coffee and ate Twinkies together. It had come to this. Then things began to get very clear. I was wasting precious time in distraction. All that mattered, and urgently, was that I be with Sam. That was our destiny. I knew. She was teaching yoga in less than an hour. No problem. I would go surprise her, and that would be that. Happily ever after. I pictured us proudly announcing our engagement to the assembled students later that day. How could I have missed such a simple solution? My already married status did not even rear its head as an impediment. I jumped up from the breakfast table, excused myself, and got on a bus headed toward the rest of my life.
The Last Laugh Page 10