Curious Affairs

by Mary Jane Myers

  Out of breath, Karen plopped down on a stone bench near a marble statue of a naked sea nymph. He caught up a minute later and sat beside her.

  She spoke first, her voice trembling.

  “I believe in evil spirits. I wish I didn’t. My family ghosts destroy everything good in my life. Just wait, they’ll drive you away from me.”

  She watched a red squirrel scrambling down the trunk of a plane tree.

  He said, “Religion, a so-called spiritual world—it’s all made up to frighten us as children, to gain control of our minds. Rational adults grow out of all this silly stuff and think for themselves.”

  She said, “If not a ghost, then what?”

  The squirrel now darted up the torso of the sea nymph, pausing to nibble her right breast.

  He chuckled. “An adroit move by that clever flaneur rodent.”

  “Be serious, George.”

  He returned to the question. “Physicists might answer that there is a time warp in that billiard room. Einstein proved mathematically that time warps are possible. The queen sits reading in 1789, let’s say on the day before the royal family finally flees. She knows that an ominous rabble has gathered at the gates, and retires to read and reflect in a secret place, a billiard room where nobody would think to search for her, uniformed guards nearby. She concludes that all is lost. The moment is fraught with psychic energy, and falls out of ordinary time. Therefore, the queen is constantly fading in and out, and visible to strangers in their own time.”

  She said, “There are more things in this world than are dreamt of in math equations. Or, for that matter, in the all the cases in your law books. I’m not going to bring this up with Dr. Sand. He already thinks I’m loopy.”

  He bussed her on the cheek. “Well, the whole point of Paris is adventure and romance. This day has certainly been adventuresome. So let’s concentrate on romance. No worries, sweetheart. It’s all to the good. It will never be bad between us.”

  They rose from the bench and walked arm-in-arm on the lanes that wound through the park, past the palace, and out the front gates to the train station. It was four o’clock, and the car was half empty. Once the train settled into its steady rocking rhythm, George dozed, his head pillowed against Karen’s arm. She sat upright and alert, watching out the window as an Impressionist landscape unfolded, the fields dotted with cattle and bordered by rows of fifty-foot poplar trees, their green foliage dusted with autumnal yellow. She longed for this whirlwind amour to solidify into a permanent attachment, marriage, a home together. Here, at long last, was her chance for a stable, loving relationship with a sane and sensible man. It was crucial to project feminine serenity, or else he would retreat. She vowed to continue her talks with Dr. Sand, who would help her exorcise those demons that haunted her. Most important, she must avoid any future entanglements with the uncanny.

  She would suggest they spend tomorrow morning together in the Louvre. The Blue Guide described in detail the floor plans and the masterpieces that hung on its walls. No untoward surprises were possible in those well-mapped, tourist-clogged rooms. She would make sure they did not stray into musty side corridors, the uncatalogued jumble of Egyptian antiquities stolen by Napoleon, where only the great god Ptah knew how many vindictive mummies hurled curses at unsuspecting museum-goers.

  Recovery

  I AM AT LOOSE ENDS the first Saturday morning after my brother Charles checks into a thirty-day rehab program in Novato, thirty miles north of San Francisco. This is his second go-round. He relapsed about two years ago, after his celebration of six years sobriety with a cake at Alcoholics Anonymous. This whole mess started, it must have been in college, those chugging contests with his fraternity brothers, the pep pills for all-nighters before exams. I’ve been teased my whole life for my goody two-shoes teetotalism. I’m his forty-year-old sister, younger than he by five years, old enough to be stoic about it all. There are only the two of us, and we are both never-married—that by itself might be a red flag for some kind of dysfunction.

  We are transplants to the Bay Area. Charles encouraged me to move for the excitement, the cultural life. He was a superstar, went to Stanford, has a lucrative career as an investment banker. I’m quite in his shadow, a graduate of a small women’s college nobody ever heard of. I’m a client service associate at a downtown brokerage firm, Charles found me the job, and I manage to support myself, but there’s no money left over for glitz. I believe he’s ashamed of me, that I don’t measure up. Still, I might have been closer to him, more sisterly, more helpful and loving, but how exactly, I don’t know.

  I simply don’t care this morning how I look. I throw on faded mommy-jeans and scrunch back my hair into a scraggly ponytail. I climb the mile-long slope that rises from my Cow Hollow apartment to Russian Hill, a gentrified block, a Peet’s coffee shop across the street from a boulangerie, outside both places, long lines of fit urbanites in trendy sneakers, staring at their phones and texting, compulsively twitching their thumbs. These crowded glamorous places make me nervous, and so I turn the other way, deliberately seeking solitude.

  After a few blocks, the tone of the street is grittier, a liquor store wedged between a pawnshop and a sex-toys emporium, cigarette butts and beer bottles littering the gutter. Ignoring caution, I turn into a narrow alleyway, unmarked with any sign, street of no return, perhaps?—if the begrimed asphalt could speak. About halfway down its murky length is a bookshop, the display windows stuffed to the gills, a cart of bargain books outside, almost completely blocking the pavement. The sign over the door reads: Welcome. We feature soulful and scholarly books from the world’s spiritual traditions. I certainly am in a soul-searching phase, and I value scholarship.

  I push open the heavyweight door. A wind-chime tinkles. The air smells of book glue mingled with lavender and cloves over a base note of mildew. The ceilings are high, higher than the room is wide, so that the space seems topsyturvy, as if beached on its side by some crazed architect. Bookshelves line the walls from the dark plank floor to the ceiling frescoed with an alchemical sun and zodiac stars.

  A clerk dressed in a flowered cotton peasant dress sits reading a book on a cushioned barstool behind a vintage brass National cash register. In the dim light I can’t make out her features, except for gray hair wisping around a thin wrinkled face and tumbling in a disheveled mass down to an undefined waist. I’m in no mood to make eye contact, so I push past her to the back of the shop. The shelves have parchment labels written in black ink in a cursive script—Astrology, Hermetic Paths—ah, here’s one that might help me: Recovery.

  I sit on a kickstool, and begin examining the books on the lower shelves, removing them one by one. All have glossy covers and photos of smiling, tanned authors with too-white teeth, and most are printed on acid-free paper that could last a lifetime, and this makes me suspicious. If the book is any good, wouldn’t a confident publisher use cheap paper, assuming that the reader will recover immediately and no longer require its advice? And who’s paying for all that dental work anyway? I crane my neck to decipher titles on the higher shelves. I lose track of how much time elapses, but finding myself once again near the cash register, I realize that the clerk is watching me.

  She blinks once through owlish tortoise-shell spectacles. “Welcome.” The voice is gravelly like that of a long-term smoker. “How can I assist?”

  I mumble that I’m just browsing.

  “Ah, we have many such as you. Do you seek any specific wisdom?”

  This inquiry should startle me, but it doesn’t really. My year in Al-Anon has accustomed me to odd abrupt questions. That’s another thing that I’m upset about. Al-Anon is the twelve-step program for families of alcoholics. While the rambunctious alcoholics are yukking it up in AA meetings in vast high school gyms, their disheartened loved ones are huddled together like the early Christians hiding from the Romans, in covert bare rooms in church basements. I’m the plodding dutiful one, and have attended Al-Anon faithfully while the brilliant, irrepressible Cha
rles blows off AA. Of course, you can’t change the way “they” are. It’s like asking a skunk to please not stink.

  I muster a noncommittal reply. “No, nothing in particular. I take anything that’s on offer, any wisdom, that is.”

  I now realize that there is something strange about this woman, over and above her diction, the formal and not-quite-grounded language that Benedictine monks and Orthodox rabbis and Hindu gurus use. She is maybe not a female, and perhaps, not even a human. As I study her, I realize that a woman-sized blue gecko is talking to me, a book clasped in the webbing of its forelegs. Its scaly skin shimmers with the tiniest hint of iridescence. This should alarm me, but the ambience of this curious place has relaxed my guard. Anything seems possible. I glance at the cover, trying not to appear too nosy. Something about Paracelsus.

  “I believe we have encountered one another before?” The lizardly mouth gapes open and shut while contemplating me.

  “No, I don’t think so. People always ask me that. They fill in my nondescript features with their own inventions, like they’re drawing me on an etch-a-sketch.”

  “Ah, perhaps from another lifetime then. Your energy seems familiar.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” I hope my tone has not turned too edgy or impolite. I try so very hard not to judge others, and to be nice to minimum-wage workers.

  “There is an indigo aura around you. You are an old soul, on a spiritual path.”

  “I doubt that. Though I did read Shirley MacLaine twenty years ago. And I love to wander into Catholic churches in the off-hours, when nobody else is there.”

  “May I ask where you are from?”

  “Nowhere in particular. Our family moved around a lot. We lived in better new-built suburbs everywhere.”

  “Ah, a woman with wings.”

  “Mostly a woman with a boring childhood. There was no there, there. Anywhere.”

  “And now?”

  “Same old. Commute, work, sleep. Pretty boring. And lonely. It feels likes there’s no real me anywhere in there.”

  Geez, I thought, this is turning into a therapy session. Wonder what the price is. Speaking of prices, it’s a lucky break that Charles’s first-class medical insurance covers the cost of rehab. He chose an upscale “executive” place. The patients scribble their angst in fancy leather journals and there’s a pasture somewhere nearby where they can pet horses.

  “You lingered in our Recovery section. For what reason? You do not manifest signs of addiction.”

  I stare at the lizard. Why I answer, I cannot say, except that I am desperate to talk to someone, anyone. I decide it must be female, otherwise why would it wear a dress? And she seems safe, an introverted reptilian type who won’t criticize or gossip.

  “My brother’s cross-addicted to alcohol and amphetamines, and he’s checked into rehab, his second try. I’m trying to recover also, from what, I’m not sure, maybe from idolizing him all these years, only to realize he’s an out-of-control wreck.”

  Sometimes I fight back tears when I talk about Charles. But this morning, I’m numb. The gecko’s tail flicks ever so slightly. Does that mean she sympathizes?

  I add a random comment. “He’s older, and I always wanted to be just like him. Now what? My pedestal needs a hero.”

  “Do you meditate?” she says.

  Why the change of subject? But actually I’m grateful that she’s not interested in the soap-opera of Charles’s erratic behavior.

  “Oh, no. Too restless.”

  She says, “Have you ever been properly instructed in meditation techniques?”

  Why is she so interested in meditation? Lizards have low metabolisms, and love to bask for hours in the sun. Maybe meditating helps when hawks are circling overhead.

  I plunge into my anecdote about meditation, the one that I’ve polished in Al-Anon, about the silent Buddhist retreat in Napa seven years ago. No food, only vegetable broth and carrot sticks that you were supposed to eat slowly with mindfulness. I went to the dojo sessions the first day, and then quit. Every morning I walked to a nearby mom and pop café for a full country breakfast, fried eggs and pancakes and bacon, and took afternoon naps, and holed up in my room, reading.

  “Reading what?” she says.

  Oh dear. In Al-Anon nobody ever asks me this question. I’m secretive about my books. But I forge ahead. After all, we’re in a bookshop. “I read a lot of literature. It was my year of reading Proust. During that whole week, I was absorbed in Swann’s Way. The landscape could have been Combray. The eucalyptus trees grew straight like poplars, and the crape myrtles were in full blossom, like hawthorn.”

  “Were you alone?”

  This creature has mesmerized me into an earnest, somewhat addled, self-revelatory trance. I reply honestly, if mechanically.

  “No, my then-boyfriend talked me into going. Later he dumped me. He complained that my chakras were in disarray, that my animus was over-inflated, that dating me was way too much work.”

  “And since then?”

  “I’ve only been with two other men, both secular types, who loved sports and hated books. They sabotaged my reading. Mostly I’ve been alone.”

  Why I am telling her all this stuff? I thought. There’s a boundary issue here somewhere.

  “Ever with a woman?” she says.

  I stare at her. Uh oh.

  “No, I’ve never, I mean, some of my good friends are lesbians, but they do their thing, whatever that thing is, I’m not even sure, I mean I don’t do anything with them. Not that I do anything with anybody.”

  “I recommend that you study the spiritual causation of addiction,” she says.

  “You mean the twelve-step stuff? I’ve been a regular in Al-Anon every Wednesday night for the past year, my brother’s therapist recommended it.”

  I pause, and then I confess my halfhearted involvement. “I don’t have a sponsor, so I’m not getting the most I can out of it, they keep saying that we co-dependents are sicker than our alcoholics, that I need to work the steps.”

  In point of fact, Al-Anon has begun to get on my nerves. It seems a kind of truth-or-dare game, and there’s a weird competitive vibe: my alcoholic is crazier than your alcoholic-addict. So much weeping, and that creepy box of Kleenex set aggressively in the middle of the circle. And those inane slogans. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Keep coming back, it works if you work it. What nonsense. The light at the end of the tunnel, another train.

  The lizard puts down Paracelsus and adjusts her spectacles. She stares directly into my eyes. I’m nettled, but I don’t flinch.

  “Those twelve steps work on a superficial level, but to discover the source of addiction, you must excavate a channel down into the primal deep. A malignant archon infected your brother with negative dark energy when he was a fetus floating in your mother’s womb.”

  I say nothing, but my expression must be puzzled. What is she talking about?

  “We keep the esoteric literature in the celestial heights, out of reach of our casual visitors,” she says.

  She gestures with saurian toes toward a rickety wooden library ladder, its metal wheels nestled in a metal track that runs along a mid-level shelf.

  “I invite you to climb Jacob’s ladder to peruse these texts. I will position it for you.”

  The metal track squeaks as she slides the ladder from ten feet away, and centers it. She points upward.

  “You see, up there, on the ninth level of shelves.”

  My practical gut screams: No way. But a vapory presentiment urges me on. I step on the bottom rung and start to climb. The ladder sways and wobbles. The volumes hover above me, beckoning. I scan the shelves, left to right. Dusty paperbacks sit cheek by jowl with antique treatises bound in crumbling calfskin. A melange, and yet a careful intelligence has selected these volumes. My head is buzzing, about what exactly, I cannot articulate, a diffuse sense of well-being, that I am on the verge of—what? My common sense is howling: Jacob’s ladder, what a crock. Get down and get the heck ou
tta here, right now. The calm voice carries on, whispers: Pay no attention to that nattering nay-sayer. Stay, stay, you are safe here, there is healing wisdom in this place.

  The Curious Affair of Helen and Franz

  AT SIX O’CLOCK on a June morning in the year of the Common Era 2005, Helen Bramer strolled on a paved fire road in the Santa Monica mountains of Los Angeles. IPod in hand, she listened to the Schubert G Minor sonata through lightweight earphones.

  The cool dawn air was glorious, scented with eucalyptus and sage, and the Schubert airs were glorious. She hummed along to the lilting theme of the violin embellished by the arpeggios of the piano. The tempo of the music was faster in this, the final movement, and she flourished her right hand in figures-of-eight, as if conducting an orchestra.

  Following the curvature of the hilltop, the fire road slanted left. A gnarled oak tree marked the summit of the hill. To the right of the tree, a path overgrown with brush meandered down the steep slope. Helen meant someday to strike out into that wilderness, but feared being scraped by burrs or bruised by stones, or worse, attacked by predators. Humans could only guess at the carnage wreaked by wild mythic creatures during those nights when fierce Santa Ana winds knocked over eucalyptus trees as tall as the masts of whaling ships. Even in calm broad daylight, coyotes trotted in pairs along the road. There were often mountain lion sightings. Once she had tiptoed around a limp rattlesnake snoozing in the warm afternoon sun.

  On reaching the tree Helen turned off the iPod and removed the earphones. A gaggle of sparrows was warbling and cooing, and three crows cawed, fighting over some bit of avian turf. A slight breeze rustled the leaves of the oak, and its outer branches swayed and bowed. She surveyed the path, which was visible only halfway down the hillside, where it vanished, concealed by a marine fog layer enshrouding the canyon below.

  A loud whistling caught her ear. The sound came from the mist roiling in the canyon. She recognized a lyrical happy-sad melody from celestial spheres: the fourth movement allegro theme of Schubert’s G Major String Quartet, the four instruments in intimate conversation, familiar from when she was a little girl, every Sunday at her grandmother’s Washington Park brick colonial for midday dinner, the Magnavox stereo cabinet and the collection of classical 33 LP’s.