She returned to her apartment, and lay in a reverie on the sofa, sipping espresso thick with sugar. The stone lay on the coffee table, dull and unremarkable. Before retiring that evening, she placed the stone on her bed stand.
Sometime during the night, the Stone spoke in a baritone voice, echoing as if out of an underground cave. “My daughter, you are one of our favorites. The path is hard, it is terrifying. You have been sidetracked for many years. Should you choose to re-enter the path, we welcome you. It is good that you picked up one of our sacred fragments. Listen to us, and we will guide you.”
The voice disoriented her. She seized the Stone, and pitched it into the sea. But it levitated on the surface, and grew larger and larger, its form more luminous, more diffuse, its round orb filling the sky.
She startled awake. A full moon filled the space of her bedroom window, its cold white light streaming in and lighting up the entire room. She lay in her bed studying the moon, the irregular patches of mountains and craters. The wind howled, and the windows creaked. The night clouds roiled and raced across the surface of the moon, and its light flickered, like a candle burnt almost down the whole of its wick. Soon, she nodded off again.
In the following three days, the Stone was quiescent. It no longer glimmered, nor did it speak. She carried the Stone to work in her purse. She would take it out often, staring at it, posing questions, talking into the air, as if to herself.
“Why are you quiet? Are you God’s messenger? What really happened in Maui? What should I be doing?”
She brought the Stone under her quilt, sleeping with it, cuddling it. The nights were fitful. On Thursday morning, she called the personnel office, and put in a request for an unpaid leave, concocting a story about a family emergency. The leave was granted. Management did not look favorably on such requests, but she did not care.
And now, for whole days she lay on her sofa, paging through the book on the Kabbalah she had unearthed from the box, recalling as if in a dream the scholarly esoterica she had once known, and long since forgotten.
On a Saturday afternoon in early October, the kitchen telephone rang. Diane let the message machine click on. Angela was recording a message. On a sudden impulse, Diane ran to the phone and picked it up. How welcome Angela’s voice was.
Angela said, “What’s going on? Have you gotten my messages? Yesterday I finally called your work, and they said you were on sick leave. Are you OK?”
“I’ve been very tired. Since my Maui trip, last summer.”
“And you and that psychologist—forgive me, I can’t remember his name—you’re no longer an item?”
“He hasn’t called me in a long time.”
“Ah well, you’re better off without him.”
The two women met for dinner that evening at Chung Huang, a neighborhood Chinese eatery, within walking distance for both. The place was a hole in the wall run by a disciplined immigrant family, and it was full. Clattering crockery punctuated the cacophony of animated diners. The walls were whitewashed, decorated with watercolors from China, depicting scenes of the countryside, ibises and water buffaloes in muted blues and browns. To one side stood an antique twelve-panel black lacquer screen, the pride of the patriarch owner.
Between bites of kung pao chicken and mu shu vegetables, Angela said, “I must be candid with you. You don’t look well.”
Diane took the Stone out of her purse and set it near the bottle of soy sauce in the middle of their table.
“I haven’t talked about this with anyone. Do you see this Stone? I carry it everywhere, and it’s disturbing me. Come back to my place after dinner, and I’ll share the story with you in private.”
Angela glanced at the Stone, a mundane, gray, round rock, nothing special. What was this puzzle? But always a good listener, she didn’t ask Diane any questions there, in public.
They walked back to the apartment. Diane unlocked the door, switched on the Tiffany-shade floor lamp and the two Stiffel brass table lamps. She fussed over her friend. “Please sit here on the sofa. I’ll fix some herbal tea.”
She returned from the kitchen with two mugs filled with steaming chamomile tea. She placed the Stone on the coffee table, and sat in the brown leather armchair that faced the sofa. She took a centering yoga breath, then plunged into an introduction. “I need your honest opinion about something.”
Angela rested her elbow on the sofa, her hand cradled in her chin. “I’m all ears.”
Diane hesitated, and swallowed. “I’ve had certain, mmm …” She tried again. “I’ve had visions lately. I don’t have a proper spiritual mentor to guide me, and even if I had, I would probably resist the help. Long ago I decided that religion is hokum, made up to control us.”
“Go on.”
She blushed and, crossing her legs, drummed her fingers on the arms of the chair. Her sweaty palms stuck to the leather. “I don’t know if my imagination is working overtime, Angela, or if I’m having a nervous breakdown, or if in fact God may actually be speaking to me.”
Angela was encouraging and said, “All of us see and feel things. It’s not at all unusual. Every human being has access to the divine.”
Diane spilled out the story, barely pausing for breath. The priestess Kate, the roundabout trek to the lava flow, the frightening buzz, Kate’s startling explanation. She pointed to the Stone.
“One night, a month ago, the Stone became hot and glowed in the dark. The letters of the Hebrew Mystical Godhead appeared on its surface. I heard the same terrifying drone of bees that I heard at the lava formation in Maui.”
She stopped the tumble of words suddenly, as if applying the brakes to a runaway train. Angela sipped her tea, and placed the cup down on the coffee table. Her tie-dyed caftan flowed over an amorphous body; the room’s oblique shadows softened the wrinkles in her round face framed by an unkempt gray 60s pageboy.
Angela’s brow furrowed slightly. In a soft cadence, as if measuring each word, she said, “I can’t give you advice, of course. But I’ll share something in confidence with you, which may make your mind easier. I’ve never told anyone this before.”
Diane said of course the secret was safe with her.
“The afternoon David died, I was in a faculty meeting. It was the year I was up for tenure. I could not afford to break any rules, or to be undignified in the presence of the department chair, who is an authoritarian from the old school. At 3:05, and I know because I glanced at the clock on the wall, I distinctly felt my spirit rise from my body. I soared to the top of the room, bumping gently against the ceiling. I looked down at the people below. One of those figures was my own body, myself.”
She paused, searching for accurate words to describe the indescribable.
“A moment later, I floated down and re-entered my body. I raised my hand, and interrupted the chair, a distinct no-no. I told him I must leave. The group stared at me, and exchanged baffled glances with one another. I walked out the door, got in my car and drove, propelled by a force I did not understand, to the exact scene of the accident one mile away, on PCH. The authorities later gave me his belongings. His watch was smashed, the time stopped at 3:05.”
Diane sat transfixed, staring at her friend.
Angela said, “I don’t know what my experience means. All I know is that I think a window into the divine opened for me that day.”
Angela smiled, and then reached over and took her friend’s hand. “Sometimes I get that same feeling from the literature I am privileged to teach, Eliot and Dickens and Trollope, all the Victorian greats channel the divine in their novels.”
Diane squeezed Angela’s hand and tears began welling up. “But, as you can see, the Stone has somehow depressed me. I feel crazy. I’m a mess.”
“It’s not the physical object. The Stone is only petrified lava. It’s that the divine has pierced the usual veil, and is nudging you to change your life. It’s not a one hundred percent change, maybe a slight readjustment, a two percent change will do. I have no idea what that chan
ge might entail.”
“But why am I singled out to change? Other people are perfectly normal, oblivious to everything but making money and having fun. And they aren’t hounded by strange buzzing gods and talking stones.”
The two drank tea and conversed until almost midnight, when Diane drove Angela home.
At five a.m. Diane drove several miles to St Monica’s, a commodious Catholic church in the Spanish style, its bell tower crowned with red tiles. The interior was dim, not yet lit for early Mass. A homeless man, stinking of vomit, sprawled in a back pew, snoring loudly. She stood near a side chapel graced with a statue of Jesus pointing to His sacred heart, aflame with love for the world. So many years had passed since she had rejected those dead Latin formulas, the vocabulary of sequestered monks. But there was that wondrous idea, of boundless compassion and mercy, of divine energy available to all who would only listen to the small still voice within.
She felt somewhat better. Still, the thought of a fullblown Mass, the wriggling children and exasperated parents, the organ blasting full-pipe, was too much. She retrieved a bulletin from a table in the vestibule, and drove back to her apartment.
The bulletin called for volunteers to assist the Franciscan Sister Clare in her urgent mission to find shelter for battered women and their terror-stricken children. On the following Saturday, Diane pushed the intercom button at the charity’s headquarters, a trailer parked in a vacant lot on a pot-holed street in Venice, the deserted stucco buildings tattooed with the graffiti of competing gangs, every window boarded up with weathered plywood. A rasping voice answered, and after Diane identified herself, the door buzzed open. A thin, no-nonsense nun of medium height grabbed Diane’s hand and shook it vigorously. The nun’s black eye-patch lent an impression of a fierce female pirate committed to kidnapping souls for the Lord. It was clear that no wife beater, even a ruffian with the bulk of a football linebacker, would dare to mess with her.
Soon it was an established routine to report to the trailer every Saturday morning to take calls from panicked women. And over the next month, Diane felt better and better.
Diane bought a delicate black lacquer stand in a shop in the Third Street Promenade. From the top shelf of her closet, she took down her box of special treasures. In the box were an intricate lace doily crocheted by her great-grandmother Alma, and a large rosary, its wood beads polished from daily use over a half-century. It had belonged to her great-aunt Sister Therese, a cloistered Carmelite. She fashioned a kind of altar, the doily draped over the lacquer stand, the Maui Stone circled by the rosary on top of the doily. This altar was the first object she saw every morning.
In the second week of November she called her hairdresser Adolphe. He threw up his hands when she crossed the threshold of his shop, and smirked at his assistant Yuki, who giggled.
“Mirabile dictu, what’s happened to you? To the rescue, mademoiselle! Yuki and I will fix you right up.”
After three hours under the hands of this master of disguise, there was her fashionable blonde self, staring back at her from the mirror rimmed with gilt seashell carvings.
Now at night she enjoyed the placid slumber of a cosseted housecat. Her looks had regained their pizzazz, and she returned to work, bounding through her days with the rhythm and discipline of a twelve-year-old gymnast. She was a regular at Sunday Mass, though she suspected that much of the dogma had been completely fabricated by argumentative neoplatonic philosophers. Somehow it didn’t matter. All she knew was that during the recitation of Psalms and at the Elevation she reached for a tissue to dab at her tear-filled eyes. And she thrilled to the zenith of every mass: that serpentine line of respectful communicants winding its way up to the altar, each person’s outstretched tongue fed by a priest, like a nestling nourished by a mother bird, a bland white wafer, the body of Christ.
Friends and acquaintances noticed a new sobriety, a new thoughtfulness. The gossip in those circles was that something had happened in Maui, positively what nobody knew. Somehow Diane was not the same. Was it that she was not as coquettish, that her conversation lacked the old ironic deftness, that she was not in the know about the latest fashion trends? That wasn’t it, not exactly. But all agreed that she was kinder, somehow, and gentler, and altogether a better woman.
Money Dragons
ON A SATURDAY MORNING at eleven o’clock, Nancy sat at a vintage claw-foot oak dining table in her walkup apartment south of Pico. Her gray-streaked brown hair tumbled in a frizzled mop past her shoulders. She sipped coffee from a chipped mug while skimming the front page of the Santa Monica Mirror. A headline caught her attention: “Rash of Ellis Act Evictions Has Hit City.” The article described the “ellis-ing,” the forcible eviction of tenants like her who lived in rent controlled apartments. Thirty years ago her Aunt Shirley had found this crumbling four-unit stucco building through a woman in her church choir. Nancy’s quarters were reached by an outside staircase of concrete slabs with a rickety corroded iron railing, open to the air and welded to the side of the structure. Inside, she had ripped out the avocado-green shag carpet to expose a dark oak-plank floor.
The orange marmalade cat, Puff, fat and in the splendid prime of his cat-life, pounced on her foot and then sped away. He jumped on the coffee table cluttered with well-thumbed paperback books bought at the library sales. Three were splayed open, face down, their covers plainly visible: My Vast Fortune, Penny Pinching, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book. Puff crouched, expectant, his tail twitching, planning another attack. She had rescued him from a dumpster three years ago, a wee hungry kitten, shivering and mewing in terror. And why had she let down her guard? Every day she lamented the extra expense, and the chaos he introduced into her spare and methodical life.
She spoke aloud into the air, half to him and half to herself.
“You silly kitty, you don’t have to worry about your next meal, at least not right now. You could do much better, you know. Fancy Feast every night and a jeweled collar. But you’re from the gutter, and you don’t know how to pick a richie mistress.”
She startled as the doorbell buzzed.
“Now, who could that be?”
She peered through the security peephole in the front door. Her first cousin Susie, Aunt Shirley’s daughter, stood on the landing. Nancy opened the door, and then the tattered screen door, which squeaked on rusty hinges.
“Well, I never, what a wonderful surprise,” Nancy said.
The two cousins embraced. Nancy felt keenly how her own size-fourteen maternal midwestern plumpness contrasted with Susie’s size-four California sleekness. Susie’s face was flushed, and she glanced around uneasily.
“Sorry not to have called. I’ve got an appointment two blocks from here, and I thought I’d pop in for a few minutes.”
Susie glided to the rose-pattern chintz sofa and eased herself down. Her denim miniskirt and black tights emphasized her lingerie-model-perfect thighs sculpted three times a week in sessions with a personal trainer. Puff jumped up beside her, and rubbed against her embroidered peasant top. She scooted away from him, and sneezed.
“Oh dear, I forgot you’re allergic. Come here, pretty kitty, and it’s off to the dungeon with you,” Nancy said.
She picked up Puff, who clawed and struggled to break free. She deposited him on the bedroom floor and closed the door. From behind the door came the sound of frantic scratching and indignant meows.
“Can I fix you coffee or tea?” Nancy said.
Susie shook her head no, and Nancy pulled out a chair to face the sofa.
“It’s been way too long. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“I’ve got a facial with Magda, who uses all organic herbs. I don’t know why these holistic types insist on slumming it.” Susie examined the five-carat diamond that sparkled on her left ring finger. Her face rimpled a little, and her eyes watered. From her allergies? Nancy wondered, wincing at Susie’s insinuation that this entire area was a blight on the prosperous Westside.
“I can’t stan
d it anymore, Nancy, I want out,” Susie said finally. Tears dripped down her cheeks, and she removed a tissue from her Gucci matelassé handbag and dabbed at them. “My mascara is ruined,” she murmured.
Nancy was taken aback. What could be troubling her cousin? Nancy owed it to her Aunt Shirley to be kind to Susie. Shirley had died four years ago from swift-moving ovarian cancer, and in the final hours Nancy kept an all-night vigil by Shirley’s bedside. Shirley was only fourteen years older than Nancy, more a sister than an aunt. Nancy missed her terribly. It was as if her fairy godmother had disappeared and she no longer had any magic charms to protect her against the impersonal forces of this gritty metropolis.
Nancy mustered a casual tone. “What’s wrong? I thought you were rich and happy at last.”
“He’s stingy. I can’t possibly fix the house up with the little he gives me. I’m thirty-nine. He’s my last chance.”
Susie lived north of Montana Avenue with her third husband Eliot, an attorney who drafted contracts for A-list actors. Her first two marriages had been Las Vegas elopements. Two years ago Eliot had financed an “intimate” wedding at the Hotel Bel-Air. Nancy, as well as Susie’s two brothers, had not made the cut for the guest list of seventy. The couple was renovating a “magical Cape Cod.” Susie’s sole job was to negotiate with an army of contractors and decorators.
“So divorce him. You’d get a nice settlement.”
“He made me sign a pre-nup.”
“You could easily find a good job.”
“I have no computer skills. And I have zilch savings. Nada. I can’t stand the thought of being poor.”
“Poor is not the end of the world.”
“It’s just not fair. Why is everyone else rich, and not us?”
“Not that many people are rich. And there are a lot of people who drive leased BMW’s who don’t have even one thin dime saved.”
Curious Affairs Page 3