by Lisa Alther
‘Far out,’ I said, grinning. I’d never been propositioned in such an exotic fashion.
‘Look,’ he said sharply, ‘this is my last chance. I’ve tried everything else I can think of. I’ve been training myself for this for a year now. If you can’t be serious about it, Ginny, if you can’t open yourself up to the possibility of transcendence, if you just want someone to roll around the yard with — please say so now, and I’ll head south.’
Well, I had no objection to union with my polar opposite. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean to sound frivolous. I’m very interested, but what would it entail?’
‘I think it would take me about four weeks to train you for the Maithuna.’
I whistled, unable to restrain my standard reaction of burlesque to any unfamiliar concept. ‘Wow! That’s what I call foreplay!’
He glared at me and began to stand up. ‘All right. Forget it. I’ll push on.’
‘Okay, Hawk. Don’t rush off. It won’t happen again, I promise.’
He sat back down. ‘Are you prepared, then, to place yourself in my hands?’
Was I ever! But I didn’t express my readiness in that fashion. I nodded meekly.
‘You must accept the fact that I am more spiritually evolved than you and that I can “see” what you need. You must repose complete trust in me and adopt an attitude of obedience, both inward and outward, at all times. Is that clear?’
I nodded doubtfully, my fingers mentally crossed. But after all, I’d entrusted myself to the far more shaky hands of, say, Clem Cloyd in the past.
‘All right. When does your husband get home?’
‘In a little more than a week.’
‘How would he feel about my staying in your house and training you?’
I collapsed in helpless laughter.
‘I could train him, too.’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t hear of it,’ I gasped between giggles.
Then I stopped and thought. Considering Ira’s approach to our sex life, maybe he would be interested in a rigorous disciplined training period, leading up to the Ultimate Orgasm. I pondered the topic, as I calmed myself. Then I remembered Hawk’s deserter status, the need to maintain secrecy about his presence, and therefore the need to explain it to Mr. National Guard. ‘No, I can’t see it working. He’d turn you in to the Feds in a minute.’
‘Hmmm. Well, you must expect to sacrifice anything you hold dear — for the sake of spiritual fulfillment. Will you leave your husband and child and come with me to Montreal for your training?’
Panic seized me. Hawk had sacrificed all his ties and prospects, the good opinion of all the people close to him, when he had deserted. He was now asking me to perform a woman’s equivalent sacrifice — to leave my house, my husband and baby, to leave my reputation in shambles, to drop everything and follow him. And here I didn’t even know his parents. It was out of the question. As often as I had chafed under the whole boring setup in Stark’s Bog, when it came right down to it, something in me wanted and needed what it represented. My struggle must have been mirrored in my face.
Hawk said quietly, “No, it’s no good now. When you’re ready, you’ll know. One day the knowledge that this is what you have to do, to free yourself from the trammels of the flesh, will descend upon you with such clarity and conviction that you won’t give it a second thought. Or even a first one. But you’re clearly not ready for the path of renunciation yet.’
I heaved a sigh of relief. There were certain advantages to being spiritually retarded after all. Never in my life had I experienced clarity and conviction in a decision. Usually I drifted into irremediable situations, or had a decision wrenched from me with much pain and struggle, like an impacted wisdom tooth. The prospect of clarity and conviction was tantalizing indeed.
‘But how can we work this out then? If I can’t stay here, and you aren’t ready to come with me, I don’t see how we can swing it.’
In a burst of undoubtedly divinely sanctioned clarity, I said, ‘I know! We have this secret room in the cellar. It was built for hiding runaway slaves on their way to Canada.’
‘Oh God! Perfect!’
We rushed down into the dim dank earthen cellar. The room was disguised as a cistern, and you entered through an arched brick wine cellar, one wall of which was a rack of barrels that swung out to uncover the narrow passageway into the room. The room itself was six by nine feet with brick walls and floor. A small transom let in a little light from outside. It was absolutely empty except for some fallen chunks of mortar.
‘Fantastic!’ Hawk announced.
I thought it was creepy myself. But I swept it out and brought in a cot and folding television tray and a camp stool. Hawk set his knapsack in a corner. He was enchanted. I was wondering how Father Bliss, whose wraith undoubtedly inhabited the wine cellar, was feeling about all this. Did he consider me to be upholding family tradition by hiding the unjustly hounded and hunted, or did he think me a deceitful bitch who was betraying his six or seven times great-grandson?
‘We’ll begin tonight,’ Hawk informed me, as I left to fix Wendy’s supper and put her to bed.
A shiver of desire shot up my spine, such as I couldn’t recall feeling for many months — not since Wendy’s conception, to be specific.
That night I descended to Hawk in a nightgown/peignoir set with my well-jellied diaphragm in place, expecting God-only-knows-what transports of ecstasy after a long dry season.
Hawk hardly even glanced up as I wafted into his room. He sat cross-legged on the brick floor laying out tarot cards. He’d hooked up a battery lantern overhead and had boarded up the transom.
He pointed for me to sit down opposite him, which I did, arranging my flowing peignoir to cover my knees. He gave me the cards to shuffle and cut. Then he laid them out in silence. He pointed to me what to do, drawing so many, turning over certain ones. He studied the groupings and made notes in a small notebook. Then he studied his notes. I felt very nervous. What cards should I have been picking to indicate sexual prowess and spiritual gifts? What previously well-concealed character flaws was he uncovering from my card configuration?
Finally he looked up and nodded with satisfaction. He pointed to a card of a skeleton in black armor on a horse, under whose advancing hoofs people were falling. He murmured, ‘Hmmm. Death. Excellent. It looks good.’
‘Death?’ I shrieked. Good God, I’d done it again! Gotten involved with a necrophiliac! Why did I always pick psychopaths for boon companions, or they me?
‘Shhh. Just relax. The Death card is beneficent. It represents the sloughing off of carnal desire, the conquest of physical death through the regeneration of the soul; destruction followed by transformation. Hippies in Montreal do readings over and over again trying to turn up Death in exactly this spot. But it’s happened for you the first time, and effortlessly, just as it did for me. The signs look very good for us, Ginny.’
Pleased with my spiritual potential, I swept back up the stairs in my swirling chiffon, having been dismissed by Hawk, who was now referring to me as his shishya. I was content to have him call me whatever he wanted as long as he got down to business pretty soon.
The next morning when I reported for instruction, Hawk said, ‘Today and tomorrow are exceptions, but from now on, I expect to be left alone in the morning so that I can work on my book.’
‘Certainly. Shall I bring you breakfast?’ I asked, eager to serve.
‘Yes, thank you. Yogurt and whole wheat toast and mint tea; please.’
I reviewed our cupboards, stuffed with Wonder Bread, and tried to figure out how to fulfill his commands.
‘Today and tomorrow, however, we will be doing a special exercise. I will need your uninterrupted presence. Can you take your child elsewhere?’
I seized on the idea of Angela and said I’d see what I could do.
‘I’ll need you down here all night, too,’ he added. ‘Try to send her somewhere overnight.’
I floated up the stairs on billowing clouds of
passion and performed the unprecedented step of asking Angela to take Wendy for two days and the night while I ‘went to St. Johnsbury to shop and visit friends.’ She was so stunned that I would have the gall to ask this of her with her four kids and new baby that she agreed to it.
I had never been separated from Wendy overnight before. I knew as I left her off at Angela’s with her overnight case that this should have been a traumatic moment for us both. Angela stood cradling her new baby and waiting for me to exhibit the appropriate emotions. She kept making leading remarks like, ‘Oh, I know how hard it is leaving them for the first time…’
I split as soon as I could, without a twinge of remorse, as Wendy stood forlornly folding and unfolding her sticky little hand in a farewell wave. I turned on the siren of Ira’s fire chief car and flew home on wings of treaded synthetic rubber. Once again I jellied my diaphragm and inserted it and descended to my shiva, as Hawk had told me to refer to him.
My shiva wasn’t in his subterranean chamber. I dashed out back and found him by the swimming pool. He was nude, crouched with one leg extended straight out behind him, its foot braced. His other leg, bent at the knee, was bearing the weight of his trunk, his chest being propped up on its thigh. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his nose was touching the big toe on the foot of his bent leg. His wild scramble of light brown hair hid his eyes.
Eventually he stood up and, switching legs, resumed the posture.
‘Verya stambhanasana,’ he notified me when he finally stood up.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Semen retention posture,’ he explained, resuming his crouch with switched legs.
‘Why would you want to do a thing like that?’ I asked in the injured voice of a prostitute whose client is wearing a condom to prevent venereal disease.
Hawk ignored me. When he stood up again, he motioned for me to follow him. He asked for sandwiches, which I made in the kitchen, and a pitcher of water. Then we descended to the basement, my nipples tingling with excitement.
As I sat expectantly on his cot, he plugged the cracks around the transom with socks from his pack. As the room grew progressively darker, I became intrigued by the extent of his modesty. He didn’t want us to see each other’s body, or what?
When the room was thoroughly black, Hawk felt his way to the door and said, ‘I want you to stay in here as long as you can. Lie on the cot as motionless as possible. If you have to take a leak, use this jar in the corner. And you can eat the sandwiches and drink the water when you’re hungry or thirsty. I’ll be upstairs. You’re on your honor to follow my instructions. If you don’t, you’ll miss the point and we’ll merely have to repeat the exercise.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Concentrate on doing nothing. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said, dismayed at not being ravaged, ritualistically or otherwise. ‘But what is the point?’
He looked at me with disgust. ‘You don’t learn anything by being told. You learn by being in situations that compel you to experience certain things.’
‘I see…’
I settled back on the cot and waited for spiritual illumination. Would I recognize it when it arrived, I wondered. I had thought as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark that I’d be able to see more — the bricks in the wall or something. This didn’t happen. I continued to see nothing. I held my hand in front of my face and wiggled my fingers, but I couldn’t see them. I could hear nothing, not even the birds that must have been warbling outside the boarded transom.
After a while, as I lay perfectly still, I lost all feeling in my arms and legs. They ceased to exist. Thanks to Descartes, I had the reassurance of knowing that, since I was still thinking, I was still in existence. I moved one index finger and noted with relief the scratchiness of the wool blanket under me. Then, slowly, tentatively, I laid one hand against the cool rough bricks of the wall. I was cheating; Hawk had instructed me to do nothing, to move as little as possible. I jerked away my palm and returned my arm to my side.
I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was very hungry. I grabbed the wrapped bologna and cheese sandwiches off the television tray and ate one. I couldn’t believe how good it tasted; normally I choked down bologna almost as unenthusiastically as I had soybean croquettes at the Free Farm. Still hungry, I gobbled a second sandwich. Then I drank two glasses of water.
I lay down. I drifted in a state of semi-sleep, passing freely in and out of dreams and waking fantasies, none of particular profundity. Twice I got up and urinated in the jar in the corner.
Hawk had said I could emerge whenever I wanted, but to try to stay there as long as I could. It appeared to me that I could easily stay all day if it would make Hawk happy. But I wasn’t noting any particular increase in clarity and conviction, in intuitive knowledge. Was I failing some test? Was I supposed to be developing stigmata or something? In despair at the thought that I was blowing my chances for the Maithuna, I reached out for another sandwich and devoured it.
As I chewed, it occurred to me, in passing and without alarm, that perhaps Hawk was carting off the Bliss family antiques in a U-Haul truck at that very moment. Maybe he would vanish from my life as I lay here in the dark. Maybe he had mortared over the doorway, as in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ and I’d never see daylight again. These fantasies left me sublimely unperturbed. I had been buried alive by a psychopath; I had been expecting a similar fate all my life. It was no big deal. I fell asleep again. When I awoke, I guzzled more water.
Suddenly the door opened. ‘How’d it go?’ Hawk asked, pulling his socks out of the cracks.
‘Fine. But nothing much happened, I’m afraid.’
We went up into the kitchen. I glanced around the familiar room with delight. It seemed so unexpectedly fresh and clean and attractive. The yellow print wallpaper was unusually vivid, and its pattern of rust and green geometrical designs leapt out at me. The bottoms of the copper pans hanging on the wall gleamed like bright eyes.
‘What have you been doing all day?’ I asked Hawk. ‘It looks as though you’ve been cleaning my kitchen.’
“No,’ he assured me with a faint smile.
We walked outside. The birds seemed to be screaming in the trees. And the grass shone in the sun with a green more vivid than I’d ever seen. I blinked my eyes several times, dazzled.
‘You’d better go pick up your child.’
‘It’s okay. I arranged to leave her overnight. I can get her tomorrow morning.’
Hawk looked at me with a faint smile and said, ‘It is tomorrow morning.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘How long do you think you were down there?’
I considered the question, trying to pinpoint some frame of reference. I’d gone down at 8:30 in the morning. I’d eaten three sandwiches and drunk some water…According to my calculations, it would have to be early evening. But then why was the sun in the east, not even to the midday point overhead? I looked at Hawk with alarm.
‘It’s eight in the morning.’
‘How can that be?’ I gasped, outraged. I felt like the Parisians in the Middle Ages who rioted when Pope Gregory XIII subtracted ten days from the calendar to synchronize it with the solar year: They thought they’d lost ten days of their lives. I had lost one entire night of my undoubtedly foreshortened life!
Hawk was studying me with detached interest. Apparently he enjoyed driving people to insanity. I turned on him, sputtering.
He shrugged. ‘Do you or don’t you want me to train you? I never said it would be fun or painless. And I never said you’d come out of it with all your most cherished notions intact.’
‘I don’t like being used as a guinea pig.’
‘I’m not using you as a guinea pig. I already know what I’m teaching you. I’m just trying to get you to entertain in your conscious mind the things you already know unconsciously.’
‘Hmph!’ I had enough trouble with my conscious mind, without its being swamped by inane i
nformation from my unconscious. But if this was what it was going to take to get laid by a war hero, I supposed I’d have to put up with it.
When I got to Angela’s, Wendy raced to me and threw her arms around my knees shrieking, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ I swept her up and hugged her, feeling odd because according to my version of reality, I’d hardly more than left her. But clocks everywhere insisted on pointing out my error. The whole idea, according to Hawk, was that it wasn’t ‘my error,’ that my version was valid. But how was one to, say, bake a presentable pie for Ira’s hunting trips on inner space time?
Angela was cuddling her new baby, who wore a pink stretch suit and flailed her little arms as though at an invisible punching bag. Her tiny head was covered with tufts of fair brown hair. Her soft spot throbbed. Longing gripped me. I craved a new baby to hold. Sensing this, Angela reluctantly handed hers to me. I held her gingerly, having already forgotten, after so little time, how to position a baby to keep its head from snapping off its wobbly neck. I leaned down and sniffed, always having loved the odor of baby powder and the generally fresh new scent of an infant. I fondled her firm flesh through the stretch fabric of the suit. Today, as a result of my sensory deprivation in the cellar, the scent, the feel of the flesh, were almost overpowering. My dormant maternal longings were rekindled. I stared at the baby with adoring desperation and shook under the strain of wanting one so badly. Babies were my bailiwick, what did I want with transcendence?
Angela smiled, taking it all in with approval. ‘Ira tells me you have your hearts set on a son this time.’
‘I wouldn’t drown either kind in the bathtub,’ I admitted. Wendy was scaling my legs in a frenzy of jealousy. I handed the sweet-smelling bundle back to Angela, reminding myself firmly that all the world adores a kitten, but who needs another cat?