Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  I read through some of Judi’s books on chakras and auras and Tantric healing and all. I liked the flowers and the colors and the provocative images of the Jeweled City, the Soundless Sound, and so on. But I wondered was this so different than a novena to St. Francis? a prayer to St. Jude? Well, there was this idea that every chakra was connected to a gland in the body, the pituitary, the thyroid, and so on. But that just seemed to unsettle the elegant aesthetics more than anything else. East or West. Prana or Grace. Soundless Sound or Unmoved Mover. My impoverished materialist self couldn’t buy either.

  As children, we all watch clouds, and we notice that that one there looks like a dragon with glasses creeping over a mountain. And this one’s a bowl of fruit. There’s Alaska. Like that. A knot on a beech tree looks like the Knapps’ cocker spaniel. We might spill a glass of wine, now that we’ve grown, turn our heads a bit, squint, and see Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” or we might stare at an inkblot in Dr. Rhadymanthus’s airy sanctum, blush, and confess to some naughty adolescent indiscretion that will never, ever happen again. A shadow on a hedge reminds us of the Quaker Oats man. We see Jesus everywhere: on a tortilla, on a freezer door, on a billboard, in the snow on the TV screen. Everywhere but in church. What we’re doing is taking random stimuli and giving them meaning. We’re not comfortable with the undesigned, the disordered. We’re forever organizing our experience into coherence. Well, some of us are.

  And some of us take this denotation too far. Ronnie, for example. I took him to lunch one afternoon when he was visiting. Took him to the café at the Worcester Art Museum. He ordered watercress on a kaiser roll and a bottle of domestic spring water. He asked me why I’d taken him to this place out of all the places in Worcester. I said, You can’t get fresh hearts of palm at Hot Dog Annie’s. He didn’t laugh. He looked around. Every gesture that anyone made in the room, Ronnie interpreted as a hand signal to himself. Occasionally, he would glance past my shoulder and touch his ear or hold up a palm like he was balancing a tray. He told me that the blackboard menu was a coded communiqué advising him that certain human operatives would be attempting to implant fictitious memories in his brain. That’s what I mean by taking signifying too far. You could find yourself in a William Burroughs novel.

  I was not invited to Judi’s ensuing sessions with Dorie. I could drop her off, and I could pick her up an hour later. Evidently, my energy fields were interfering with the magnetism in the room or something like that. And I was probably inhibiting Judi and Dorie. But the real reason for my exile, I would learn, was that I was the source of Judi’s cancer. Well, the I she’d met in that former life, the I who was called Père Berard and who knew Judi, who was then Marianne, a hundred and something years ago up the St. Lawrence in Québec, knew her, it turns out, in the biblical sense as well as in the social and pastoral, caused her to be with child, to despair, and to drown herself. And now, a century and more later, Judi has still not come to terms with her remorse, her shame, her regret, and it is killing her.

  And Judi was, in fact, beginning to feel better. She had more energy these days and more strength. She told me she could actually feel the tumors shrinking. I said, Let’s get an X ray and confirm it. She said, No X rays until I’m recovered. I said, One or two X rays can’t hurt. She said it would be like sucking plasma off a high-tension line. She told me what had become clear to her only recently, that the universe—actually she said “universes” and explained that the earth’s universe is just a single bubble in a vast boiling cauldron of universes, and that that multiverse is just a fractal in a landscape of multiverses, and so on—that universes, then, are not composed of dead matter, insensible duff, but constitute a living organism, a presence. What I know now, she said, is not that I will possess eternal life, but that I already do. And I didn’t argue with her. Hope is hope, I thought. It’s not true or false, it’s just hope.

  65.

  The Secret Life

  DORIE HAD TOLD JUDI THAT SHE COULDN’T EAT ANYTHING WITH A FACE. SO NOW Judi was preparing a vegetarian supper for Dorie's visit. Salad, focaccia, manicotti, spumoni. I reasoned with Judi. I said clams don’t have faces, and I don’t think you could call what a shrimp has a face, either. Judi said, I think what Dorie meant was if it tries to get away from you when it’s alive, then you shouldn’t eat it. She smashed a clove of garlic with a mallet. Oysters, I said. Mussels. Judi shook her head no. I realize that your favorite animal is the brisket, she said, but tonight we’re eating meatless, and you’ll like it. Now set the table.

  Dorie arrived with a house gift, two black rocks about the size of softballs. Boji stones, she called them. The scarred one with the ridges is a male, the smooth one a female. She told Judi they were healing stones. They helped close holes in your energy fields. Judi gave her a big hug and a kiss. Maybe it was the idea of gender-specific rocks that set me off. I don’t know. It might have been a troubled day of writing. Anyway, I felt confrontational, haughty. I wanted to engage Dorie Marcelonis in battle. So I poured myself a martini—I had a pitcher of them ready in the fridge. Dorie said, No, thank you, but she would have a glass of red wine. Wine it is.

  Dorie and I went out on the deck while Judi finished the cooking. We would take advantage of the unseasonably warm early spring weather. I introduced Dorie to Spot. Spot licked her sandaled feet. He has a thing for salt, I said. Dorie kissed Spot right on the mouth. Spot, she said, you’re a monkey.

  We sat at the table. I lit a citronella candle. I cleared my throat. We raised our glasses. To you, I said. She smiled. To Judi. We drank. I said, “You know, I don’t like this idea that cancer is a symptom of some emotional sin in this life or in another. That’s blaming the victim, it seems to me, and it’s kind of sick.”

  Dorie smiled. She fiddled with an earring—a silver hand with a star in its palm. “I understand your skepticism,” she said. “We’re not blaming anyone. We’re just searching for causes.”

  I quoted Oscar Wilde (who hasn’t?). I told her, “ ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ The secret of life is the visible, not the invisible.”

  “That’s very wry,” she said. “But also ironic, don’t you think?”

  I apologized. “I didn’t mean I thought you were shallow.” But, of course, that’s exactly what I’d meant. “How come if I was involved with Judi’s suicide and stuff back in Canada, back when I supposedly was this Berard person, how come I’m not screwed up from it?”

  “Who says you’re not?”

  “I don’t have cancer. I’m not dying.”

  Dorie raised her eyebrows; she sipped her wine.

  I said, “You think I have cancer?”

  “You may be physically fine for now, but emotionally? spiritually?”

  “You think I have emotional problems?”

  “Do you?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” I wondered when I had started my retreat. Wasn’t I trying to confront Dorie on her frivolous spiritualism?

  Dorie said, “So tell me about this life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Heights.” I meant this to be a smart-ass answer even though it’s true.

  Dorie raised those eyebrows again. “When you look down, do you think the ground is pulling at you?”

  We heard Judi call us in. We pushed back from the table. I saw myself on the ledge of an office building about ten floors up. There’s an open window about thirty feet away My hair’s blowing in my eyes. I look down without moving my head. I’m petrified.

  The meal was delicious. It made me wonder why I thought I needed to eat meat at all. Then I remembered the smell of bacon frying, grilled hot dogs on toasted rolls. Sure, I could live without prime rib, but without fried baloney? We’re talking quality of life here.

  Dorie asked me what my stories were about. I hate that question. It would take every word of the story to answer honestly Otherwise, you can give only a stupid answer, which I did. I said, Life and death, beca
use what else is there? But as soon as I heard myself, I knew I didn’t want to stop on that word, that phrase, so I said, I write about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but that wasn’t right unless you consider falling in love extraordinary, which maybe it is.

  Dorie took a bite of spumoni. She said, “I mean, what themes do you try to explore in your stories?”

  “Well, loneliness, grief, separation. Like that.” I didn’t think we should be talking like this with Judi sitting right here drinking her herbal tea. I didn’t want her to get depressed.

  Dorie smiled. “I wonder where your obsessions with those issues come from. Do you know?”

  I knew that I was on my second martini and that I was gabbing away with a psychic healer and a psychotherapist and that I should probably be more circumspect in my revelations, be a little more cautious. But instead I said something offensive, something about wanting to keep the mystery in life and creating art out of what I couldn’t understand. What an asshole.

  I guess I was lucky. They found me pompous, not hostile. Dorie laughed. Judi told me I’d have to clean the kitchen for my penance. I apologized. I apologize a lot. All my life I’ve been apologizing. For spilled milk, for hurt feelings, for being late, for being on time, for expressing opinions, for spacing out, for being in the way, for not being around. “I’m sorry”—a motif in my life that I hadn’t realized before then.

  Judi and Dorie took their teas and retired to the deck. I cleaned up—put all the leftovers into a bowl and brought it out to Spot. He cleaned his plate. I did the dishes. I was afraid of losing Judi. I remembered when I was about five I got lost at a carnival. I looked up and my family was gone. I couldn’t even yell. I just started running. I tried to stay in the lights, I remember. I was so panicked that I guess I didn’t hear the PA announcer call my name, ask me to come to the carousel, but I couldn’t have found the carousel anyway. I just ran until I tripped over a dog, I think it was. I lay there in the dirt and cried. A man picked me up, held me in his arms, and started walking. He smelled like gasoline. I thought he was carrying me away to his house, and I thought that would be fine, any house would be fine. When he handed me to my sobbing mother, I wouldn’t let go of his blue sweater.

  When I went out to join Judi and Dorie, they were talking about Pauline. I said, Pauline from Mr. Natural’s? like I knew a dozen Paulines. Dorie nodded, said Pauline was moving away soon. She’s met this terrific guy, a carpenter. He’s great with the kids. I said, Isn’t she married? They both just looked at me. Uh-oh. Dorie said, Marvin’s sort of out of the picture. And anyway, I don’t think Pauline’s getting married yet. They’re going to move up to Phillipston or Templeton, somewhere up there.

  The phone rang and Judi went in to answer it. I wondered if Pauline had ever mentioned me to Dorie. I wasn’t going to ask. I told Dorie about the carnival episode, said I thought it was such an insignificant event to be the source of a lifetime’s inappropriate and antisocial behavior.

  Dorie said, “Well, maybe you think everyone’s going to leave you. That would make you cautious in relationships. You’d be reluctant to commit yourself.”

  I thought about that. I said, “But no one has left me,” which wasn’t quite true.

  “Because you leave them first.”

  I made a face, tried to express incredulity.

  “Your wife?”

  “I think it was a little more complicated than that.”

  “Girlfriends?”

  “Well, look, there were things on their part that might have accounted for the breakups.”

  “Of course. We’re just speculating.” Dorie rubbed her arms like she was cold. “It’s interesting that you would go with the gasoline man. You really need someone to take care of you.”

  “Let’s say that was all true. Let’s say my parents abandoned me for real at a carnival. That would still not be an excuse to hurt people or hurt myself.”

  “Theoretically, you’re right. I agree. But you can’t ignore your past. Better to understand your fears, so you can deal with them, prevent yourself from hurting someone or yourself.”

  Judi returned, said that was Trixie calling to tell her about Layla’s new tattoo. She got a big radiant sun on her back. Judi said why didn’t we get in out of the chill. We went to the parlor with our freshened teas and martini. Judi sat on the couch. Dorie sat across from her on the chair. I put some Charlie Parker on the stereo and joined Judi. We talked about odd things, extraordinary things that had happened in our lives.

  Dorie said she’d been married once and that on her honeymoon cruise to Nova Scotia she saw Johnny Mathis at the captain’s table, introduced herself, and he sang “No Love (But Your Love)” to her. And once on a trip to Machu Picchu to witness a UFO landing, she ate monkey brains and chilies with Shining Path guerrillas.

  Judi’s turn. When she was fifteen, she went on a retreat with the girls in her parish to Nantucket. While she was there she saw a rose bush with blue roses. Then, in eighth grade, she made it to the finals of the national spelling bee in Washington. She was one of the ten best spellers in the country She lost when she misspelled the word quinonoid, which she spelled for us. I didn’t know why Judi had never mentioned the spelling bee before. I asked her to spell xanthous, psephology, and coelacanth, which she did.

  Judi said, “You’re up, laughing boy.”

  All right. “I met Mother Teresa in New York when she came to America for some kind of surgery. I drove down with Martha and the auxiliary bishop. We went to a reception. Mother was tiny, talked incessantly in several languages, gave me a holy card, and asked for donations.

  “When I was fifteen, I was standing outside the Central Building when I heard people start screaming. I looked up to see a man in the air, seventy feet up. I couldn’t believe it. A man in black trousers and a white shirt. One of his shoes flew off. I turned away. He sounded like a watermelon hitting the sidewalk, and, I saw, his skull was opened like one.”

  Dorie said she’d better be going. Judi walked her out to her car. I told myself that Pauline wasn’t abandoning me. In fact, I thought that whole abandonment theory Dorie worked out wasn’t right. It didn’t feel like the truth. But she was right that there was something back there in my childhood. I could sense that now. When Judi and I went to bed, I lay there thinking about my parents and about our life at home when I was young. I remembered listening to them make love in their room across the hall. Edgar was always asleep. I always wanted to be, but my anxiety kept me awake. I wanted to be able to close my ears like I closed my eyes. My mother would give directions. My father would grunt, squeal, snort. His lack of language appalled and frightened me. I didn’t know what I thought then—that Mom was Circe and Dad was her pig or that he was a beast and Mom the savaged waif. I just knew I was uncomfortable.

  I thought about sex with Martha, how polite it all was, how methodical, pleasant for the most part, but not ecstatic. Dutiful, you could say. Because I feared becoming a swine? losing control?

  I remembered another scene from childhood. I was about eleven. My parents had had a bitter quarrel during which my mother threw a dish of spaghetti across the table and hit Dad in the face. We didn’t see him for a week. When he did come home, Mom stayed in her locked bedroom. Dad made coffee, sat at the table. I asked him how he was. He said, Fine. He motioned me over, hugged me. He was crying. I thought maybe they’ll get a divorce, and I found the thought comforting. This would be a quiet house. I wouldn’t get bossed around so much, wouldn’t have to listen to his jaw crack every time he chewed. I’d be a special child somehow, the man of the house. I sat at the table and poured myself a coffee. I’d never tasted it before. I burned the roof of my mouth.

  “So, Dad, did you come to get your stuff?”

  “What are you talking about, Laf?”

  “You leaving us?”

  “I wouldn’t ever leave your mother. Couldn’t. She’d die without me.”

  I remember thinking, Never? Stuck forever? You’re nice
to someone and they expect you to stay where you are for the rest of your life?

  66.

  How I Saw You, How I Fell in Love, How an Awful Madness Swept Me Away

  DALE’S CONFLICT ISN’T WITH THERESA AT ALL, BUT WITH HIMSELF. I THINK I understood that all along, but I hadn’t really felt it. Dale doesn’t want to be alone, but he often wants to be left alone. He wants to love Theresa, but he’s not sure he wants her to love him. Interesting, isn’t it? In fact, he already loves Theresa, which means that he has relinquished some control over his life. That’s what he thinks, anyway. But is this love he proffers or adoration? And if the latter, does he think of Theresa as an object? an idol? All his life Dale has worshiped women from a distance. Whenever he got close to a woman—and that happened only three times—he found that she did not live up to his expectations. They were as flawed as he was. So how could they save him? Poor Dale. Wherever did he acquire these addled notions of love? Surely not from me.

  I caught myself thinking about Daphne Engdahl, wondering if she’d remember me if I stopped by one afternoon for coffee and a botany lesson. Two in the morning. I looked at the clock. Two-sixteen, actually. I made coffee. I wondered if it was the right week to plant the flowers I’d found in the cellar that time. I poured my coffee. I checked to see that Judi was still sleeping quietly.

  Dale and Theresa are driving through the West Texas night on I-20, coming home from Abilene. Maybe Dale had an economics conference at Hardin-Simmons. Maybe Theresa has an old friend from nursing school living in Potosi with her second husband. I don’t know; I’ll figure that out later. Dale’s driving the pickup; radio’s playing a Mexican waltz. Theresa’s staring out her window. Sign ahead says SWEETWATER, NEXT EXIT. They’ve been quiet for fifty miles. Theresa says, I was in Sweet-water one time.