“I need some time,” Jonah said. “And you do too.”
As I tumbled from the sky, Jonah’s friend, Michael Two, swooped in and scooped me up. The only reasonable response was to sleep with him. Having been with Randy Sanders from age fifteen to thirty-one, I had lost time to make up for, and Michael Two was famous for his sexual proficiency. But the next thing I knew, Michael Two was moving in with me. He was fun to be with, but he was not my beloved. There was only one person formed in the exact shape to fit my exact shape, and he was not even returning my phone calls. So I girded my loins and tried to love Michael Two the best I could.
Meanwhile, Randy Sanders spiraled into an alcoholic mania. He smashed the wall of south-facing windows in our passive solar house while we were camping in the Gila Wilderness, claimed to have swallowed a lethal dose of pills several times a week and then hid under the porch when the paramedics came to fetch him, and custom designed curses for Jonah and me. Mine was: you will never have a baby. Jonah’s was: you will not be with Mirabai, and you will never find happiness with anyone else.
One day Michael Two and I drove to the airport in Albuquerque to drop off his daughter, who had been visiting for the summer from Southern California. My mother had booked a room for us at a bed-and-breakfast in Old Town, arranged a gift certificate for an Italian restaurant on the Plaza, and took the girls for the night. I needed a break, and Mom knew it. Between my ex-husband’s violent shenanigans, the abandonment by the love of my life, my accidental domestic arrangement with Michael Two, and finding my way as a single parent of two daughters with special needs, I was friable. I had dipped below ninety pounds, which satisfied the old anorexic in me but horrified my family, who tried in vain to ply me with lox and bagels.
I could not choke down our fancy dinner out that night and made Michael Two eat my fettuccine alfredo. Back at our hotel room, we made love with the TV on. Afterward, I went into the bathroom and took a look at my naked self in the mirror. But it was not my jutting clavicle that drew my attention; it was my face. A terrifying radiance emanated from it. I had never seen such beauty, and I gasped, as if I were encountering a beautiful other. I met her eyes with my eyes, and we gazed lovingly at each other for a while. When I lay down to sleep, I rested more deeply than I had in my whole life.
The next morning, Michael Two and I went to Corrales to have brunch with Charlene, my mentor from graduate school and the godmother of my daughters. Charlene was brilliant and hilarious. She had earned three PhDs by the time she was twenty-two: one in mathematics, one in physics, and the other in philosophy, but she was the humblest and quirkiest person I knew. She modeled to me that a permeable heart and a finely tuned brain are not mutually exclusive, and she freed me to express myself in hyperbole. We were physical opposites. Charlene was Sicilian, with lanky limbs, a halo of black curls, and an olive complexion always perfectly enhanced with red lipstick.
Charlene greeted us at the door of the house she shared with her husband, Kevin, and swept me into her bony embrace. Then she suggested I call home.
“What? Why?” I asked. Kevin handed me a cup of coffee with a sad smile.
“Is it my father?”
Charlene nodded, took my other arm, and led me to her study.
Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few months before I left Randy Sanders. The year before that, he had moved his widowed mother from Miami and taken care of her until she died a few months later. Living with an elderly Jewish princess with growing dementia was not easy for a curmudgeon like my father, but he galvanized his team and did the best he could to feed and dress and entertain her. Within months of Grandma’s death, Dad found out he was sick. While I was navigating the tumultuous seas of my divorce, my father had been dancing with his mortality. True to his drunken-poet lineage, Dad had embraced his cancer as a troubling but interesting new friend.
“It’s an adventure, Cookie,” he assured me.
Lately, he had been resting more. After his surgery and radiation, Dad had enjoyed six months of relative good health, during which he flew to Las Vegas and played in his first bridge tournament since we had left New York. He had also accompanied Mom and Ramón to the Yucatan, where he stayed with them in their winter home on Laguna Bacalar, swimming every day in the Lake of the Seven Blues. My mother and her lover had taken on the details of my father’s care, coordinating medical appointments and researching complimentary alternative therapies. But recently, the cancer had come back, and Dad was trying to decide what he wanted to do next.
What he did next was die.
Instead of calling my mother, I dialed my father’s apartment, and Mom answered.
“Mom? Is Dad okay?”
“He’s gone, my love.”
Wait! We had not had time to plan a good death. He was not even bedridden yet. Only last week he mentioned to me that maybe I should call a few of his old friends and ask them to stop by and visit. He was lying on the couch in his apartment with a Pall Mall in his hand and an ashtray on his belly. I curled up beside him in an overstuffed chair and met him in the growing silence. He kept drifting off and then opening his eyes and gazing around with a puzzled expression. I had been watching his cigarette burn down low between his fingers, and I finally slid it from his hand and stubbed it out.
“I have been visiting the other world, Cookie, and I have to tell you, it’s much more real than this one.”
Now he had crossed that boundary, and this time he was not coming back.
My mother murmured soothingly into the phone. She told me that his friend Karim had come over to watch a football game with my dad and ended up washing his body instead, along with my brother, Roy, who had been tending our father all summer. Mom assured me they would keep Dad’s body in his bed until I could get there to say goodbye.
“I’ll be home in three hours,” I said and hung up.
In the pulsing silence of Charlene’s office, I wrapped my arms around my own chest and spun in a slow circle in her swivel chair. Suddenly, it was my father’s arms cradling me. Holding me as he had never been comfortable enough in his own skin to hold me in real life. Comforting me, keeping me safe. I let myself down into his embrace.
“Oh Daddy,” I whispered.
It was only later, as I sat in silence while Michael Two drove me home, that I remembered my encounter with the beautiful being in the mirror the night before. I realized this had been my father coming to say goodbye.
12
MONKEY TEMPLE
When I left Randy Sanders, I fired God. Every aspect of my spiritual life had been shaped by my association with an imposter. Suspicious of anything resembling an organized belief system, all the teachings I had once embraced I now dismissed as artifacts of magical thinking. My parents, Freud, and Marx were right: religion was the opiate of the masses, and my addiction had almost killed me. It was time to sober up.
I quit reading spiritual books. I stopped going up to Lama for Shabbat and zikr (Sufi chanting). I took down most of my pictures of saints and deities, and I stashed my statues of the goddesses and Buddha in the closet. I gave away my Jai Gopal and Sufi Choir cassettes, and I made fun of the people I knew who flocked to convention centers to get hugged by the Hugging Saint or take the Bodhisattva Vow. I didn’t give up my basic hatha yoga practice, because I had been doing the sun salutations almost every morning of my life since I was fourteen, and the cells of my body had formed around those movements. I also maintained a silent sitting meditation practice because I noticed that when I didn’t, I had more of a tendency to yell at my children for no good reason.
I endeavored to replace my spiritual escapades with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Well, maybe not drugs—I still had a propensity for slipping into altered states, and so I wasn’t interested in anything more than a glass of red wine with dinner—but I did dabble in sex. My relationship with Michael Two lasted less than a year, and I went on to experiment with a variety of flavors of men, rebuilding what Randy Sanders had destroyed. I quickly discove
red that I could not keep my heart out of the equation, and so, after sleeping with a few men who, to my surprise, did not want to spend the rest of their lives adoring me, I decided to be more discerning.
My closest friend was our next-door neighbor on the Hondo Mesa—a singer-songwriter named Jenny Bird. It is true that she had an inclination toward the spiritual life, but I did my best to change the subject whenever she spoke of such things, shifting the focus back to music (or sex). I became Jenny Bird’s road manager and spent a few euphoric months as the girlfriend of her bass player. When the Beautiful Bass Player—who was too creative to hold down a job and so relied on me, a struggling single mother, for support—began to act more like a resentful teenager than an equal partner, it was clear to us both that we had no future. I lamented the loss, but checked that fantasy off my list and settled into the ongoing project of mending my broken life. I was in my early thirties, mostly single, a little bit lonely, and every nerve ending tingled with possibility.
Jenny Bird also had two daughters, and we raised our children together. Her Jessie was the same age as my Jenny. The two girls were intertwined, like a vanilla and chocolate swirl ice cream cone. There was a well-worn path through the sagebrush between our houses, along which our children effortlessly flowed. They built fairy circles in the summer and snow castles in the winter. Both girls were ambivalent about clothing and often showed up in nothing but a pair of red cowboy boots. I reveled in the ordinariness of my life as a mother to my daughters and a member of the flawed and beautiful family of humanity.
The one spiritual attachment I could not seem to give up was my devotion to Maharaj-ji (Neem Karoli Baba). Maharaj-ji was just iconoclastic enough to slip past my conditioned skepticism and override my newly cultivated cynicism. Maharaj-ji, too, was suspicious of religiosity. He had the gift of slicing through illusion with a single glance. He did not pontificate; he radiated. He was not pious: he was a rascal. And most compelling of all, Maharaj-ji was not even in his body anymore, and yet he continued to infuse and inform every aspect of my life. He was more accessible than any human being I knew. I had kept his picture with me since I was fourteen years old, and the combination of affection and mischief in his eyes had been the campfire in my wilderness. I took refuge there.
The scene that had unfolded around him was another matter. The only Neem Karoli Baba ashram outside of India happened to be right in my home town, and it was populated by a cast of irascible characters, endowed with many versions of genius, but seemingly unable (or unwilling) to function in mainstream society. Because I loved devotional chanting, I could not resist slipping over to the ashram now and then to sing to God (who I no longer believed in). I brought Jenny with me, and she would fall asleep in my lap in the temple room during kirtan, the call-and-response singing designed to invoke the divine attributes of the Hindu pantheon: Ram and Sita, the exiled lovers; Kali and Durga, the ferocious and tender faces of the Divine Mother; Shiva, Lord of Transformation; Krishna, God of Love.
At the heart of Maharaj-ji’s Taos ashram was a giant marble statue of the monkey god, Hanuman, which Ram Dass had commissioned a few years after his guru’s death and shipped to America in the early 1980s. Hanuman is the quintessence of selfless service and devotion. He is also a trickster: playful and powerful, tender and undomesticated. Many of Maharaj-ji’s followers saw their guru as an avatar of Hanuman, and they had built a Hanuman temple in his honor so that there was a place in the West where they could gather to remember the man who reminded them of the god, who reminded them to become the embodiment of loving service (God knows, they tried).
In the Hindu legend of the Ramayana, Prince Rama and his beloved wife, Sita, are exiled to the forest. Sita is abducted by the evil demon, Ravana, who carries her off to the island of Lanka, where he holds her prisoner. Hanuman rescues Sita (who represents the feminine aspect of the godhead) and returns her to Rama (the masculine aspect), thereby restoring wholeness to the cosmos. It is precisely because Hanuman thinks he is only a monkey that he is worthy of worship as a deity. This singular humility always appealed to me about Hanuman. I felt like just a monkey, too. Even when I had a sleazy pseudo-Sufi (a.k.a. Randy Sanders) trying to turn me into the Goddess.
I did not notice him right away. Like a leaf moth blending into the foliage, Jeff had spent a lifetime disappearing into his surroundings. I was vaguely aware that he was the father of several satsang children—including Kali, one of the little girls Jenny played with every week at the ashram—but I never heard him speak, nor was I inclined to engage him in conversation. I didn’t interact much with anyone, actually. I went to the Hanuman temple to sing.
One day I ran into my friend Satrupa at the chai stand. She handed me a cup of hot black tea with milk, sugar, ginger, and cardamom and then poured one for herself.
“How’s your love life?” she asked.
“I’m kind of with someone. He’s a screenwriter.” Michael Three claimed to have been Timothy Leary’s personal assistant in the early seventies. He lived in Santa Fe, and though he seemed to wake up early every morning and write until the sun went down, at which time he commenced to drink late into the night, I never saw him actually produce anything. He also did not believe in monogamy, and I never knew when I drove the seventy miles to visit him whether he would be in bed with another woman when I arrived.
“Kind of with someone?”
“Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
I shrugged. “Me either.”
“Because I know someone who’s interested in you.”
A cocktail of adrenaline and dread washed through my bloodstream. “Who?”
“Jeff Little.”
“Who?”
“Him.” Satrupa pointed across the outdoor dining area to the playground, where my love interest was trying to keep his teenaged daughter from wrestling the car keys out of his hand. They were laughing. Suddenly he spun around and tossed the keys to his middle daughter, who ran up the slide and then threw them back to her father.
“Too old.”
“What? He’s forty-eight. How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“That’s perfect. What are you talking about?”
Here’s what I was talking about: after squandering my youth on Randy Sanders, I was determined that my next life partner would be no more than five years older than me, preferably childless and dying to step right into a ready-made family. Jeff was a tall, middle-aged white guy with a receding hairline and three daughters, at least one of whom was old enough to drive. Besides, he seemed too nice, too quiet. No edge. Boring.
“Nah.”
Satrupa shook her head and smiled sadly. “Your loss,” she said. “He’s one of the best human beings I know.”
The seed Satrupa planted managed to niggle its way into my psyche, and soon a small green shoot had sprouted. I kept thinking about Jeff, wondering if I was making a mistake to reject someone who appeared to be stable and warm, caring and witty. A grownup. And someone who wouldn’t require an explanation about my devotional nature and my peculiar spiritual background.
I kept running into him around town. There he would be, opening doors for me at the post office or the bank, his eyes lingering on mine for a moment as I dashed past. He was leaning against the wall with his latte at the coffee house, watching me read my poetry on stage. He took all the children swimming in the Rio Grande on a summer day—including mine—and dropped Jenny off at home in the middle of a thunderstorm, running up to the porch holding my daughter’s hand and then disappearing back into the rain. I made a point of ignoring him. Now that I knew he was attracted to me, I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea.
And then there was Jonah. After three Michaels, I still hadn’t quite worked Jonah out of my heart. Meanwhile, Jonah had moved on without, it seemed, a backward glance. He lived nearby in Santa Fe, and I would see him now and then at satsang gatherings, which stirred the embers of illusion and blew smoke in my eyes, conjuring longings
and regrets that kept me awake for a few nights before I came to my senses again. Jonah had tidily concluded that the karmic purpose of our unrequited love affair was for me to break free of my monstrous marriage, and he was satisfied with his role as catalyst in my escape. Now five years had passed since our first kiss, it was late summer, and Jonah was getting married to someone else. And he invited Jenny to be one of the flower girls at his wedding.
I blasted Melissa Etheridge on the car stereo (“Dance without Sleeping”) as I drove up the mountain road to the communal land where the festivities were to take place. I intermittently wept and muttered. Jenny sat beside me, casting nervous glances in my direction. She seemed to get that I was working things out. By the time we passed the raspberry ranch and began the last climb to the location of my beloved’s wedding to another, I was determined to bless him on his way.
But my heart had not quite caught up with my mind. I released Jenny into the hands of the bridal party and headed to a small pagoda built on the edge of the meadow, opened the double doors, and entered. The space was profoundly quiet. I approached the altar at the end and bowed before a statue of the seated Buddha. Then I picked up a round black zafu and sat. I cannot do this on my own, I whispered, to no one in particular. You’re going to have to help me. I opened my hands. Take it from me. Take this pain. After a few deep, slow breaths, I dropped into the stillness and rested there. I watched with awe as my old broken-heart story fell away like a sand cliff melting back into the sea. Then I stood up, walked out into the meadow, and bore witness as Jonah married his tall blonde bride. And it was fine. It was totally fine.
After the ceremony, Jenny met up with the other temple kids and ran off to play, and I went in search of water. It was a hot day in late August—the same day as the anniversary of my wedding to Randy Sanders, as a matter of fact. I tried to put that association out of mind—both for my own sake and Jonah’s. As I approached the giant cooler where the drinks were kept, I saw Jeff talking with another wedding guest. So he does speak, I thought.
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