The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

One young San Francisco poet was writing long epic poems about the love he bore his wife and children. He was reading them to us at night. Curled up by his side was the Chinese student he was fucking afternoon and night.

  There was a mad poet from Minnesota who wanted everyone to dance together at night. He was the life-affirming poet and on his fourth National Endowment grant. I liked his style if not his poetry.

  There was a drunken fiction writer from the East Coast who showed up two days late and took me off to get drunk with him. I told him some lies about how much I loved Malraux and he was about to fall in love with me when Simone broke it up. “Quaaludes,” she said. “That’s all I have to say about him. Don’t get mixed up in that.”

  Of course she turned out to be right. The next night I started to go to bed with him but then I found the bottle of pills in the bathroom and changed my mind. I put my shoes back on and told him another lie. “I can’t sleep with you after all,” I said. “I would only be doing it because you won a Pulitzer Prize. That’s not a good enough reason. We’d be here for ten more days trying to figure out why we’d done this.”

  “Are you sure you feel that?” he asked. “Or is that something Simone told you to say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s such a rabid feminist. I don’t think she wants anyone to get laid.”

  “What do you mean? She’s married and she has dozens of admirers. She’s the sexiest woman her age I’ve ever seen.”

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Yes. Forgive me. We’ll have breakfast in the morning.”

  I left his cabin and took a long walk up and around the old naval base, which was the site of the conference. There was a full moon. The huge wildflowers that grow on the Pacific coast raised their faces to me in the moonlight. On top of a bluff overlooking the barracks I came upon a group of students sleeping in sleeping bags. They stirred when I came near and I said hello and went back down the path and went to bed.

  But this was five days later and I was in the back of the MG. I had forgotten the help Simone had given me with my poems. I had forgotten the lunches we had shared, the long sunbaths on her porch, the good advice she had been lavishing upon me. All I thought about was this goddamn Mormon taking up the front seat and all of Simone’s attention.

  “It isn’t all crap,” Mary Anne said. Simone had gotten the thermos from the trunk. She poured coffee for the three of us. We stirred it with a plastic spoon. We drank.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me the part that’s true. You know what you need to do, Mary Anne. You need to go back to school and learn some things. About biology and primate behavior and anthropology and chemistry. You need more facts. You know this polygamy stuff the Mormon men got into? It’s just primate behavior. Men are herd animals. ‘. . . a hillocky bull in the swelter of summer come in his great good time to the sultry biding herds . . . ,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote. Every male poet I know adores that poem. It’s about fucking a lot of different women, and all alpha males want to do it. Most of them do do it. They want to fuck everybody, but they really want to fuck alpha females because chemistry or the unconscious or whatever tells them that will make the strongest children. Alpha females are better mothers. They want to impregnate you and let you spend the rest of your life taking care of their DNA. All this is true. This is real information. Religion is just a bunch of crap designed to get you to accept the status quo without complaining or shooting them. God, I can’t believe the things that go on. The human race.” I strode off down the road about twenty yards and then came back. Simone was leaning near Mary Anne. Probably telling her not to mind me or that I was right or that I was wrong. Who knows what she was saying.

  “The Church is a force for good in our community,” Mary Anne began. “It takes care of young girls when they get in trouble. That’s why they take the babies. So the girls can have another chance. So they won’t be stuck with it.”

  “But they’re stuck anyway.” Now I was getting mad. This was my main issue and the one I would eventually write about when I learned to write what I knew. “Listen, Mary Anne, you told us yourself the girls come back to see you, grieving for the children they relinquished. The children the Mormons took. You admitted they didn’t really have a choice. They had to have the babies and they had to give them up. That’s barbaric. Totally barbaric. Come on, let’s go. If I have to ride in the back of the MG, I want to get it over with.”

  “I shouldn’t have come along,” Mary Anne began. I fit myself into my uncomfortable nest and Simone got behind the wheel and started driving.

  Ten miles down the road it began to rain. Rain came out of nowhere just as we were passing a stretch of clear-cut forest. In the distance Mount Olympus was wreathed in clouds. You could see where the rain began and stopped. Once this had all been rain forest, hundreds of miles of mystery. Now we were going to visit what remained. Already it was making us sad and sober.

  We pulled over and put up the top and now I was really crushed in the so-called backseat. “You tell me how to alleviate human suffering,” I said. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Women having babies makes suffering. It does. For every time childbirth is a good idea, there are three times it’s a bad idea. India, China, Africa, our slums, take a look. What do you see?”

  Simone answered me. “You know that old story about the walled town where everything was perfect and the people were completely happy? The only thing that was wrong was that a little girl had to be kept all her life in a dungeon to maintain that happiness. No windows, no light. Once a year the townspeople had to file past the dungeon and look at her. After that, some of the people would always leave. Go out the gates into the desert. The ones who stayed would keep on being happy.” Simone looked straight ahead as she spoke. The windshield wipers pushed against the pouring rain. “Who is that child in our culture?” she added.

  “The ones who shouldn’t have been born,” I answered. “The ones who are born to helpless mothers. Jesus Christ, there are no answers, are there?”

  “So what can we do each day?” Simone speeded up, pushing the MG through the rain. “Because nature doesn’t care about us. Nature doesn’t give a damn one way or the other. Only man cares for man. I don’t hate religion as you do, Rhoda. Much of it has to do with goodness, kindness, charity.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re Jewish. What does a Reform Jew know about indoctrination? Hell and damnation. You’re right. I hate it. It’s all madness.”

  “Not everyone is smart enough to do without a God.” I couldn’t believe the Mormon had said that. I might have to rethink the Mormon.

  “You’re smart,” I offered. “Write a book about the home you ran. Tell the stories you told us. Publish it. Get some cards out on the table.”

  “She’s going to,” Simone said. “She has files, notes, letters. I’m going up there this winter and help her with it.”

  “How much farther is it?” I asked. “I don’t know how long I can maintain this position.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Simone answered. “Hang on. The rain has almost stopped. If no one minds, now I’ll drive this car.”

  She pushed the pedal to the metal. She floorboarded it. She drove that little car like it was meant to be driven. Heavenly to remember a time when we lived like that. When no one ever seemed to be afraid of a thing.

  Then we were there. We parked in a lot with other cars and got out and walked into an enchanted forest. I have never been anywhere more beautiful in my life. It was a cathedral, a cool, green paradise. Trees as big around as houses, as tall as ten-story buildings, trees that are hundreds of years old. Moss and vine and brilliant flowers, capes of moss, silence, fabulous, ancient silence.

  It is called the Hoh Rain Forest and it covers nine hundred thousand acres of land in the Olympic National Park.

  We walked together across a wooden bridge and went deeper into the wildness, coolness, mystery. I had an overwhelming desire to be alone with it. I didn’t want to speak. The
se trees were beyond language or human thought. They existed in a time of their own. I signaled to Simone that I was leaving. Then I hurried down a path. They had stopped to read a plaque beside a Douglas fir. I don’t think they even saw me leave. I pushed on until I was out of sight of all the other tourists. A rope ladder was hanging from a Sitka spruce. I climbed it until I was in the branches of the tree. I hung there, swinging gently, thinking of the story Simone had told us. Who was that little girl? Not me. Certainly not me. I had had the best our culture has to offer since the day that I was born. How dare I not be happy? How dare I resent a human soul? How dare I be mean to the Mormon? Think of the courage she had shown, to come to a place like this among people who were bound to be contemptuous of her life. And yet, I cannot love her, I decided. What is wrong with me that I cannot learn to love? What good is Simone to me if I learn nothing from her?

  I will burn my stupid poems, I decided. I will burn everything I’ve written and start again. If I cannot write with love, if I cannot know compassion, I will give it up and go back to playing tennis.

  I climbed back down the ladder and started moving along a path. I was getting high on oxygen. The trees were so dense, the air so rich. There was so much to breathe, so much to learn, so much to understand. I would never do it. I would live and die an ignorant savage, a stick of protoplasm wearing borrowed leaves.

  I walked for what seemed an hour. I wandered off the path and back onto the path. I was not worried that I was lost, and I didn’t want to be found. Suddenly, the path opened out onto a rocky beach. I had come to the Hoh River, a shallow, fast-moving river fed by melted snow from the glaciers on Mount Olympus. I walked to the edge of the cobbled stones and reached down and felt the water. It was very, very cold. So clear it was like a mirror. Fish flashed by across the rounded stones. The sound was indescribable, without pattern, as random and chaotic as an electron dance, as hypnotic as a Bach fugue. The Glass Bead Game, I decided. Here is where I’ll find it. I looked around me, at the cobbled beach, the mountains in the distance, the hovering forest. Then I lay down upon the stones and fell asleep.

  It must have been an hour later when I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Simone’s worried face. “We were afraid you were lost,” she said. “We thought of finding a guide. Then I saw you. Are you all right?”

  “I fell asleep,” I answered. “Enchantment. Where are we, Simone? ‘What is the time and the place?’”

  “It’s daunting.” She sat down beside me. Mary Anne was thirty feet away, wading in the water. “I’m so glad you came. So glad you came with me.”

  “I was mad when you asked the Mormon. I want to apologize for that.” I leaned back on my hands. “Let’s move in,” I said. “Let’s live here.”

  “Someone did, I suppose,” she answered. “Imagine their lives. So much has been lost. But other things are found.”

  “Like what?” I answered. I was waking up. “Name me one thing we have made to compare with this river.”

  “Smocked dresses for little girls,” she offered.

  “Why did you tell me that terrible story? I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

  “I wish I hadn’t reminded myself of it.” We looked down the river to where Mary Anne was standing in the freezing water.

  “Let’s put her on a diet,” I decided. “Let’s take her to Seattle to go shopping. Let’s get her a lover, or a divorce.”

  “She can’t leave. She has children. It’s a world, a way of life. She can’t escape.”

  “Can you?” I asked. “Can I?”

  “We have. That’s why we’re here.”

  “If I could stop wanting things. Wanting more and more. These trees are greedy too, Simone. All that life in there. So beautiful, but each life form is trying to crowd others out. The capes of moss on the trees. Remorseless, unthinking. What if we are like that too? What if we are as cruel as the rest of nature?”

  “Do you feel cruel?”

  “Selfish. Mostly selfish. But I would go into the barn with you to save the women. And something else.” I stood up. “I wouldn’t stay in the town with the child in the dungeon.”

  “What would you do? Walk out into the desert and starve and die?”

  “I would start a movement to let her out. I would tell the people that we didn’t need to keep her there. That it was a lot of bullshit. A lot of lies we had been taught. Were there priests in the story? Who was in charge of putting her there? Who kept her there?”

  “They would all be against you. Your father and your brothers. Maybe your mother and your sisters. Everything that made you safe.”

  “I’d overpower them or I would find someone who could and band together with them. Come on, let’s collect the Mormon and go back into the forest. I’m starving. We need to find somewhere to eat.” I stretched and yawned. “I will love her,” I added. “I’ll help her if I can.”

  “She’s the little girl in the story.” Simone stood back, giving me one of those goddamn politically correct looks that drive me completely up the wall. There’s a smell to that kind of thinking that poisons the air for miles around.

  “For God’s sake, I know that. Except she’s not in a dungeon. She’s at the apex of power in that culture. She has money and possessions. It’s not the same thing, Simone. I want her to escape, but you and I both know she can’t. Well, it’s hopeless, let’s get going.” Mary Anne was walking toward us, a big, sad-faced Amazon who could be thought of as a war criminal, or part of the burgeoning wonder of the physical world, or a recruit in a revolution, or just a big unhappy woman looking for a way to live.

  “I have better things to do than run around with Mormons,” I added. “But this is your trip. I’m just along for the ride. I will try to love her as I do air or light on the river, Simone. But you walk with her through the forest. I don’t trust her not to say something stupid about the trees.”

  Excitement, Part I

  Everything was going along just fine until the Frenchman came to town. Abby’s brother was in the habit of taking care of the foreign students at Tulane and he’s the one who met him. This Rugby-playing Frenchman who was six feet tall. I heard about it when Abby and I were out running in the park. “Phillip’s got a Frenchman for me to meet,” she said, when I asked her if she could come to dinner that night. “I have to stay at home because he’s going to bring him over.”

  “A Frenchman,” I said. “Well, that should be interesting. What kind of a Frenchman?”

  “A tall one who plays Rugby. Phillip met him last Saturday at a Rugby match.”

  “I’ve never met a Frenchman. I never get to do anything. When is he coming over?”

  “I don’t know. About eight o’clock, I guess.”

  We ran in silence for a while. I was eaten up with jealousy. I’m the one who deserved a Frenchman. Only I was married so I didn’t get to have anything, except an occasional poet who showed up or something like that.

  “I might come over and meet him too. I’ll come after dinner.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t come over.” We were running pretty fast and we were panting, so our conversation was turning into pants.

  “Okay, I won’t come over. Keep your Frenchman to yourself.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  “Do you want to do another lap?”

  “Sure, if you do.”

  “It’s obsessive.”

  “I know. Let’s do it.”

  We rounded the flower clock. We passed the swings on Saint Charles Avenue. We passed the pro shop at the golf course. We passed the chin-up bars. We passed the tree that was the first thing we ran around two years before when we had started running. It was a small circular walk around a huge old moss-covered oak tree.

  “Remember the day we ran around that tree?” I asked.

  “We could hardly make it a quarter of a mile.”

  “We’ve come a long way since then.”

  “We have, haven’t we?”

  “If I hadn’t
made you start running, there wouldn’t be any Frenchman. You’d be so fat no Frenchman would look at you. I think you ought to let me come and meet him.”

  “Why do you want to meet my Frenchman?”

  “Because I’ve never met one. Because I’m bored to death. Because I don’t have anything to do.”

  “You have your husband. And you have the tennis player.”

  “Big, big deal. He won’t even return my phone calls.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he says I’m married.”

  “You are married. Your husband’s a great guy.”

  “He is that. And a wonderful father. So what?”

  “I wish I was still married.”

  “What for? It’s slavery. You have to tell them where you are every minute.”

  We passed the curve at Magazine Street. We passed the bicycle racks. We passed the volleyball court. “I’m turning off at Prytania,” Abby said. “I have to go do something with my hair.”

  “Okay. Go on. I’m going to run another lap.”

  “Obsessive.”

  “Who cares.”

  Abby turned off at Prytania and ran in the direction of her car. A secondhand Volvo her father had given her a week ago. I watched her long legs and long brown hair disappear into the shade of the live oak trees. I ran alone. I was thinking about going over to the tennis player’s house and leaving him a note. Then I thought better of it. What I really needed was a divorce, but I didn’t know how to get it. I didn’t know how to do anything and I had never had a job so I didn’t know where to start to stop being married.

  I kept on running. I ran another lap, and then, as luck would have it, the tennis player came by on his bicycle and began to ride along beside me.

  “Why didn’t you call me back?”

  “Because you’re married.”

  “But I don’t want to be.”

  “But you are.”

  “So what? Put your bike down and run with me.”

  “I don’t have a lock.”

  “Okay.”