A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey

  I decided to tell Zoe about my experience – I could not disguise the state I was in – but when I arrived home Zoe was asleep.

  She slept for a long time. It was unlike her but I thought of it as a blessing. It gave me the hours to compose myself.

  In the days immediately following, I could never find the right moment to get the words out. ‘Guess what? On Saturday I had this strange experience. I saw this Indian woman and I cried like a baby. What do you make of that?’ Then I decided it was an aberration, a random event of no consequence, and Zoe would only be disturbed by my account of it, possibly even panic-stricken; better that she didn’t know.

  Soon I began to think of the experience as unexceptional, and by the end of the week a confession had become unnecessary because I had found within myself the reason for this strange behaviour. Stress. I was overwrought. Working too late, sleeping too little. And the woman had been so compassionate, so beautiful in her ways that she had moved me at my most vulnerable. And if for the first time in my memory of myself I had wept, then no doubt it was because I had felt safe: among strangers. It was like the story of the two men on the train who tell each other their most intimate secrets, safe in the knowledge they will never meet again, will never have to endure a relationship burdened by their defenceless intimacy.

  On the Monday I was on my mettle, waiting for Mark to sidle up and say something, but that morning he phoned in sick with what subsequently proved to be a severe bout of hepatitis. His convalescence was prolonged, and carried out at his parents’ home on the south coast, by which time he had been head-hunted for a job in Hong Kong. On the day that Mark eventually came in to farewell his colleagues I was at a conference in Melbourne. And thus it was that I never saw Mark again. I sent him a note at his new workplace to congratulate him and wish him well, but did not think to ask if he had in fact been at the Chatswood Community Centre on that Saturday morning. Mark sent me a jokey pornographic postcard from Hong Kong, and that was the last contact we had.

  And so I forgot about her. It was just one of those turns, one of those blips on the radar screen when an asteroid careers through the heavens. Until a strange thing happened: at the point at which I had almost forgotten the experience, she began to appear in my meditation.

  One torpid morning, when my daily ritual seemed stale, when it seemed to be getting me nowhere, I thought for the first time that I might abandon the practice. At that moment her face floated into my inner vision. It was nothing dramatic: no flash of light, no heart-jolting frisson. Just her dark-skinned face, hovering in my mind’s eye with luminous clarity. And a few days later it happened again. But I thought nothing of this. Many images came and went in the distracting mangle of thoughts that passed in my case for contemplation. Did I believe in the process? Perhaps I never had believed in it, but I clung to it like a capsized fisherman might cling to a piece of the wreckage from his drowned boat.

  As time went on, that dark, luminous face began to arise in my meditation more often, sometimes as soon as I sat down and closed my eyes. Before long she was there with me almost every day, though only for a matter of seconds. And what I felt with each visitation was entirely neutral. No tears. Nothing. And who was she? I had no idea.

  A year passed.

  One morning I saw her face on a poster in the window of a New Age bookshop in the Chatswood mall. According to the poster, she was a Hindu saint from a village in Tamil Nadu. It seemed that once a year she toured the cities on the eastern seaboard, bestowing her own peculiar form of blessing on her devotees, and on any members of the public who cared to come. In two weeks she would be in Sydney again: same time, same place. And what would happen, I asked myself, if I went to see her, this time deliberately, knowing what was in store?

  When I returned to my office I checked the date of her visit in my diary and saw that I was booked to run a training program in Adelaide. Good. That settled that.

  As it happened, the training program was postponed. But it was, nevertheless, a full weekend: a school concert of Luke’s on the Friday evening, a picnic lunch on the Saturday, a dinner in the evening at the harbourside penthouse of Zoe’s boss.

  On the night before the picnic I thought of her, of how she might already be in the city, and I recalled my meltdown of a year ago and felt strangely indifferent, as if it had happened to someone else.

  Lunch on Saturday was a barbecue in Centennial Park. Zoe and Luke and I arrived in good time and lugged the picnic hamper to the designated spot by the Federation dome, chosen because the children could ride their bikes and there was space for the families to have a relaxed game of baseball.

  It was an overcast day, a bank of charcoal cloud hovering low in the sky. Zoe’s brother Ben came with his kids, who were on their paternal access weekend, and he and I talked listlessly about politics. Was it me, I wondered, or did all conversation suddenly seem stale? Sentences snapped off in mid-air and hung dangling. Ben seemed to be saying the same things, over and over, but he was in a better mood than usual. Everyone was in a good mood except me.

  When I looked at the others it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, a kind of stoned feeling where the figures in the landscape retreat from you and come increasingly to seem two-dimensional. The more stoned you become, the more the life leaches out of them. Either that or you are staring through a pane of thick glass.

  After lunch I volunteered to walk the children over to the kiosk for ice-creams, and on the way I gave myself a pep talk. It didn’t work. All through the day I was edgy and didn’t know why. I had charred the steak, knocked over a bottle of wine so that it seeped into the bread and stained Zoe’s picnic cloth, and worst of all had been impatient and distracted with Luke. Sent out to mind second base, I drifted off into some white sphere of discontent that soon had me marooned in a knot of self-reproach.

  It was just after three when I looked at my watch and thought: I could just make it. I walked over to where Zoe was sitting beneath the blue-gums, as happy and relaxed as I had ever seen her. I looked down at her dark glasses and her broad straw hat and it was as if I scarcely knew her.

  Bending low to her ear, I said. ‘The car keys are in my jacket. I have to go for a walk. Don’t ask me any questions now. I’ll be back in time to take Luke to Rachel’s.’

  Her mouth opened but nothing came out. I could almost feel her body sag as the pleasure of the day seeped out of her and she felt, yet again, abandoned by this miserable, moody bastard she had married, who could never just surrender himself to the joy of ordinary things. I knew that if I hesitated, her sadness would derail me and then I would resent and, later, torment her, so I strode off up the hill to the road and hailed a taxi.

  Once in the car, it occurred to me that I had no money. I asked the driver to stop at an ATM, but as the cab slid into the kerb I realised that – of course – I had no cards on me. My wallet was back in my jacket on the grass under the blue-gums, and it was too late to go back. The cock had flown the coop and by now he was demented. ‘Just drive on,’ I said to the cab driver.

  Halfway across the bridge the sun broke out from behind grey cloud and the glare blinded me. What is the matter with me? I asked myself, but whoever had asked the question had no real interest in the answer.

  When we reached the place, I opened the door and said, ‘I haven’t any money on me. I came out in a hurry and left my wallet behind.’ (How lame this sounded.) And I took off my watch and said, ‘Will you take this?’ The driver – Lebanese, I guessed – looked at me as if I were mad, then shrugged. Slowly he took the watch, inspecting it as if it might explode in his fingers, and then he looked at me again with a guarded expression. ‘How do I know you won’t say I stole it?’ he asked. I shrugged, helplessly. Something in the mordant anguish of that gesture must have attested to my sincerity because he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, and slipped the watch into his pocket.

  Within seconds I was bounding up the steps to the wide doors of the hall and could scarcely slip out of m
y shoes fast enough, leaving them carelessly angled across an outsize pair of shabby sandals. Inside, my gaze went straight to the space at the front, below the stage, and there she was, in her plain white cotton sari, as before, and seated with the same luminous composure. Nothing had changed, all was exactly as it had been a year ago, except now there were more people and the hall was full. The queue extended all the way down the middle of the floor with monitors on either side.

  I must join it now, I thought, without delay. I couldn’t afford to hesitate because it would be a long, slow wait to receive her blessing, and within two hours I must be home. And now I had no watch to keep time. I looked around for the wall clock I remembered from last time but it was no longer there. Damn. I would have to ask whoever was next to me, and I patted my pockets, looking for my handkerchief, only to find I had left that behind as well. Soon the tears would come, it was inevitable, and I would have to snivel into a tissue like a woman. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter? These were mere details, and I had never been more beyond mere detail in my life.

  And it didn’t matter, because no tears came. I realised I had been looking forward to those tears, to losing myself in a comforting wave of self-pity. Instead, as I drew closer to her in the queue, shuffling along on my rump, I felt that a knot in my chest was loosening. How long had that knot been there? Why hadn’t I noticed it before? A calm sweetness begin to course in my veins, and when at last my forehead was resting against hers I felt my heart pop like a bubble, and the bliss rose up into my head in a pink haze. Then I stood, and glided to the side of the hall, and sat on one of those bare wooden benches I had wept in, for so long, exactly twelve months ago.

  After a while I turned to the young woman next to me and said, ‘Do you have the time?’

  It was ten past six, and Zoe and I were due in Bronte at seven-thirty. I had fifteen minutes to make it back home. Impossible! Could I drive in this state? Unthinkable, and yet I would have to go. And then it occurred to me that I didn’t have the car. Propelled by some clockwork mechanism, I made it to the door, where the fresh air, humid as it was, brought me into real time and I half-walked, half-ran to a taxi rank in the nearby mall.

  All the way back to my house, over the bridge, up City Road, I sat gazing ahead as if in a trance. How could I describe to anyone what I had felt in the hall that afternoon? It was not that the words were not available: the words were simple, as was the feeling. For the first time in my life I felt that I had come home.

  Zoe was waiting for me in the bedroom upstairs. ‘I’ve taken Luke to Rachel’s,’ she said, ‘and you have some explaining to do.’

  Here it was; there was no way around it. I loved my wife and I did not want to deceive her. I took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been to see a woman,’ I began.

  She cut me off at once. ‘I thought so,’ she hissed. ‘I thought so. It had to happen sooner or later, didn’t it!’ Her face was a mask of venom.

  At that I opened my eyes wide, as if I had just been told the most amazing joke, and almost laughed out loud, because it dawned on me that she was assuming I had a mistress, that I was on the brink of confessing to an affair. Of course: the stock figure, the middle-aged man in midlife crisis who falls in love with a younger woman who understands him, who makes him feel himself again. And it was all too ludicrous, too much of a cosmic joke, and I began to chuckle and shake my head like the condescending prick I was, until she hauled off and struck me across the face.

  I sank onto the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands until I could control myself, until I could control the strange mirth that threatened to convulse my body. Zoe stood above me, seething, both fists clenched and held up to her breasts. At that moment I admired her as much, if not more than, I had at any time in our marriage. Instead of dissolving into bitter tears she was ready to batter me. And all I could do was laugh! In another minute she would think me mad, would feel the ground sliding out from under her feet again, would know that here was the all but final phase of my disintegration …

  A cool draught of self-possession finally took hold of me. I dropped my hands from my face, looked up at her and patted the edge of the bed beside me. ‘Sit down,’ I said.

  Zoe’s first reaction was guarded. Who was this woman? Where was she from? She’s from India, I said. Her name is Sri Mata, a courtesy term meaning revered mother, and she’s a spiritual teacher, a yogi, a celibate woman who has never married and who has disciples around the world. I took out a thin booklet I had stuck in my pocket and gave it to Zoe. ‘Here, read this.’

  She sat and stared for a minute at the face on the cover.

  ‘I have to go and see her again tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘For God’s sake, Rick, we have a lunch tomorrow with the Cranes. We haven’t seen them for ages and they’ll be offended if you pull out. It’s taken us weeks to find a clear day.’

  ‘Tell them I’m sick. I have to go. On Monday she leaves for another year. Why don’t you come with me?’

  She shook her head, and, folding the booklet neatly, deliberately, she put it on her bedside table beside the clock. Then came the quiet tears. ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘There’s an evening program. I’ll go to that. I’ll come to the Cranes’.’

  At around six in the evening of the following day I drove back across the bridge, this time on my way to a different meeting hall in Roseville on the fringes of the northern suburbs. And all the way there I felt a calm elation, a blithe weightlessness. I had been released from the dull round, the banality of everyday life, and I was on my way.

  The old scout hall at Roseville was built of wood with a tin roof, and around the entrance the grass was ragged but the interior was warm with a mellow rustic ambience. I knew from the booklet that the evening program was a special one where those who wanted it could take mantra initiation, and I had made up my mind to ask for a new mantra. The old one that Jack had given me had served its purpose: it had brought me to her.

  From the opening bars of the devotional music sung by her small entourage, to the last minutes when I helped to pack up the dusty hall at around three in the morning, the entire night passed in bliss. The seven hours that I spent in her presence seemed to last for around thirty minutes. None of it was hazy; indeed, it had a clarity that I would never feel again. Every movement, every gesture had a lightness, a quality of dance. The light in the hall had a soft electrical charge, and it shone on the faces in the crowd so that their skin glowed with a translucent sheen. When I knelt before her and she breathed the Sanskrit syllables of the mantra into my ear, I was beyond self-consciousness and had to stifle an impulse to touch her feet. I felt that I had merged – with the crowd, with the wooden chairs in the hall, the honour boards against the wall, the flowering shrubs in pots along the stage, the musty velvet, the bright electric light inside and the warm night beyond.

  At last, around two in the morning, when everyone had been up to receive their blessing, she stood, and with that graceful and playful matter-of-factness I found so enchanting she walked briskly to the side of the stage, where she took up a broom and set about sweeping the floor. Others rushed to assist her, and for a noisy half-hour we dragged chairs and collected shawls and sweaters and empty paper cups and all manner of lost property.

  At last we were done and she walked, a small, white-clad figure, towards the main door, where one of her devotees, a man about my age, had arrived late and was waiting for her blessing. When he knelt at her feet she tousled his hair playfully and joked with him, though I was not close enough to hear what was being said. All I could do was marvel at her relaxed focus. It was as if this man were the first blessing of the night, not the last; as if she had just arrived at the hall, fresh from a bath and a long sleep, instead of having sat there for seven hours unbroken, without food or water, hemmed in by the sweaty and tearful bodies that presented themselves. And this, I apprehended, was perhaps the most miraculous thing about her: this relationship to time. No moment was the beginning or the end of
anything, only itself. She was brisk yet unhurried. At the end of the night she was exactly the same as she was at the beginning.

  As for me, I had never felt less tired in my life. Along with what remained of the crowd, I wandered out onto the steps of the hall. It was a balmy evening and the sky was clear and pinioned with stars. Looking up at them, I could not remember a time when I had felt so at ease in the world, so loose in the living of it. And then I was distracted by a ripple of laughter from those around me, and I saw that she was moving slowly down the driveway in the back of a black sedan while a young man who had broken away from the crowd danced barefoot beside her window, throwing rose petals across the bonnet of the car.

  The car stopped. She wound down the window and reached out to grasp his hand, which she kissed, smiling at him almost mischievously, as if they were sharing a private joke. Her eyes had a fire in them and her white teeth flashed in the dark. The car began its slow crawl onto the main road but still the young man followed alongside, pulling flower petals from where he had stuffed them in his pockets and tossing them high into the air, strewing petals on the bitumen and dancing along the empty highway like a madman, while we who had gathered on the steps of the hall laughed and applauded.

  On the drive home I gave a lift to a young couple and went several kilometres out of my way to drop them at their door. It was, I reflected, that kind of night, and in truth I didn’t want to go home. Not that I didn’t love the two sleeping bodies that lay waiting for me, but I wanted to prolong the magic, my sense of being beyond, or free of, time.

  When at last I cruised into the fluorescent cavern of my garage I felt in my pocket for the small photo I had carried away with me, bought from the bookstall at the side of the hall earlier in the evening. This was one of the few discordant moments of the night: the many images of her face for sale as if she were some kind of pop star. It reminded me of the dismal church iconography of my childhood, of all I had come to abhor. For a time I had gazed at the various shapes and sizes before I purchased the smallest photograph I could find, smaller than a postage stamp and clumsily encased in Perspex, handmade but tacky in the Indian way. Perhaps, I thought, I would sit it discreetly in the top drawer of my desk.