S.

by John Updike

  Your friend sounds charming, perhaps too charming. Charm is what European men are famous for, but there are qualities our ungainly native boys have that are worth treasuring—trustworthiness, for one, and the willingness to work to support a family. If Jan's father is a count, why are they in the brewery business? And why was Jan at Oxford studying economics when the London School is the one you always hear about, where the Arabs and everybody go? I know you're finding my motherly concern tiresome but one does read stories here of the goings-on in Amsterdam, right out in that big main square—it's the drug capital of Europe, evidently, and still has boys with hair down to their shoulders and wearing buckskin and all that that went out here when Nixon finally resigned. Do be careful, dearest. You were sweet to reassure me that Jan is not a homosexual, but in a way it would be a relief if he were. You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on—the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It's rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won't quite catch fire, isn't it? Though every day when the sun shines in the branches outside the window or the fruit in the bowl matches the color of the tablecloth or your favorite Mozart concerto pours out of WGBH at the very moment when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, you feel as if you are catching or have caught, after all—somebody held the match in the right place at last. Really I shouldn't be putting being a woman down—it has its duhkha but I wouldn't be a man for anything, they really are numb, relatively, wrapped in a uniform or plate armor even when their clothes are off—or so it has seemed to me in my limited experience. And I sometimes wonder if my limited experience, limited really to your father for twenty-odd years and a bit of hand-holding and snuggling before that, wasn't enough after all, and if for your generation more wasn't less. I mean, we all only have so much romantic energy with which to rise to the occasion, whether one man or two dozen makes up the occasion. Of course your Jan seems to you to be a fully feeling and responsive human being now, just as Fritz did to me a month ago. But afterwards, if you can bear to talk to them—these meaningful men—it turns out that their minds even at the height of the involvement were totally elsewhere—were not really in the relationship at all! They were only and entirely what we in our poor fevers made of them.

  From my tone you might gather that I have moved out of Vikshipta's and Savitri's A-frame. I am living instead in a nicer, newer one, with two of the women I work with in the ashram offices—Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa (tall, but without your beautiful generous figure with its long swimmer's muscles and your lovely push) and Nitya, who is the head accountant here. Nitya is rather small and dark and nervous and has been quite sickly lately. I can't quite tell if she and Alinga are lovers or just like sisters, but they spend a lot of time in the tiny kitchen, with the curtain that separates it from the room where I'm sitting drawn, murmuring and even arguing about this other woman called Durga and drinking jasmine tea. Vikshipta was furious when I told him I was leaving and—don't be alarmed, my sweet—became a bit violent. It turns out that far from being Durga's lover as I once imagined, he bates her for having (he imagines) corrupted the Arhat and shifted the emphasis away from hard-core psychotherapy to large-scale utopianism. He was always going on about the good old days in Ellora before the Arhat became so soft, when they were really making breakthroughs in consciousness-smashing, using Jung and tantra and human potential and "cathartic physicality," which seems to mean people got beaten up. Besotted as I was with love—a woman's drug—I slowly realized that he was really sounding very compulsive and fanatic about it. I said to myself, This man is a Hun. He can't tell tantra from a tantrum. He had a lot of unresolved anger and, looking back at that first encounter (did I tell you about it, or was that Midge?), I wonder if Yajna wasn't acting out Vikshipta's desires, in trying to break my jaw and the rest of it. (If this is news to you, don't worry about it, darling, I feel fine now, never better in fact, though I was afraid for a while my molars were shaken loose and I'd have to fly back to dear fussy Dr. Podhoretz.) I've gotten to know Yajna a lot better now and he's extremely suggestible—just a boy, though he's something like twenty-three or -four, perfect for you, in a way—his family is nice old railroad money from Saint Louis and I think if his head weren't shaved his ears wouldn't seem to stick out so much, and in a seersucker coat or a quiet tweed he would be quite presentable.

  But, my darling, you are on the other side of the world and have your own life to lead and I mustn't be matchmaking even in my silly head. I do wish I had more positive associations with the Dutch, instead of clumsy wooden shoes and leaky dikes and Dutch treats and that awful way they treated the natives in Java when they had a chance, and still do in South Africa. You say Jan is lean and speaks English perfectly and plays the keyboard (is that really a musical instrument now or still just part of one?) beautifully, and if he pleases and amuses my Pearl I will find it in my heart to love him. I mustn't love any of your gentlemen friends too much, for I expect there will be many.

  The young men here are rather realer to me than the beaux who with sneaky sheepish looks on their faces would appear at the door to carry you off in their convertibles and pickup trucks. Isolated as the ashram is, and united as we all are by our love of the Arhat, the generational barriers that at home (but this is my home now, I must remember!—they have a droll way here of talking about the United States, the country we after all live in, as "the Outer States") prevent us from seeing one another except as the stereotypes that television and advertising wish upon us melt away here, the barriers, and a not-at-all-uncommon sight is to see a young sannyasin in his violet robes and running shoes walking hand in hand with a gray-haired woman in her fifties. The other combination, the one we all know about in the outer world, the young chick and the old guy, is oddly rarer—their superior shakti perhaps gives the women here the upper hand that money gives men outside. At any rate, the boys would not by and large do for my Pearl. The gay ones have that gay way of walking so there's no up and down to their heads, just this even floating even when they're moving along very briskly, and their voices have that just perceptible fine-toothed homosexual edge that used to get my hackles up when I'd hear it in Boston (though of course I knew it shouldn't) but that here I've become quite happily used to. They're basically so playful, at least in regard to someone like me who is not quite ready to stand in for their all-powerful mothers but getting there, and good-hearted actually (they've suffered, after all, much as women do) and so devoted in their love of the Arhat, not to mention clever, truly handy at making the place run, in regard to things like electricity and irrigation and drainage and security and surveillance and counter-propaganda, which we have to put out or be crushed. They tend, incidentally, to be pro-Durga—she appeals to their sense of camp. Then the other type of young men, and they probably overlap but I'm never sure how, much, are the thoroughly habituated—the outside world says brainwashed—adepts at yoga and detachment and biospirituality and holism, young men who when they wait on you in the Varuna Emporium or the drugstore have this ghostly sweet hollowness in their voices as though nothing you did would break their tranquillity or alter their karuna for you. It makes me want sometimes to throw a fit or spit in their faces to get their reaction, but I fear that's the old devil in me—the prak-riti in me, the impure transitory nature that hasn't yet been burned away in self-realization. I sometimes feel as if I have traded being mother to one beautiful long-legged heartbreakingly intelligent and emotionally sound daughter for a tribe of shadowy, defective sons. As I write that, I sense your father's homophobe prejudices—he sees them as all diseased—speaking through me, and that is the old me, from the Outer States, terribly unworthy of all the love and trust showered upon me in this divine place by both the sexes.

  I wish you could meet Alinga and get to know her. Like you, she has blond hair, but with less body
and radiance than yours. How I used to love, when you were little, to give you a shampoo in the tub, just for the tingly way your clean hair smelled afterwards and the angelic way it fluffed out about your head as it dried!—we assume little girls play with dolls in anticipation of motherhood but it could almost be we become mothers just so we can play with dolls again. Up to about the age of eight you did resist it so, screaming about the soap in your eyes. Children feel everything so much more keenly than adults—a bad taste is mountainous, and a single particle of soap in your eyes was the horrid blinding end of the world. I bought something for you called baby shampoo (No More Tears, the label said) but I could never make it lather near as well. Alinga's hair lies flat to her elegantly narrow little skull and falls utterly without a curl away from a central parting so bone-white it's like a chalk line drawn in a diagram. I love that innocent prim straightness, it reminds me of how we girls used to look in the morning at Miss Grandi-son's Day School before the day mussed us up. She—Alinga, of course—is I believe thirty-one and has been around the world several times since leaving Cedar Rapids and arriving here, and I know you and she could share so much—through her, my dear elf-child, I often feel drawn closer to you. She can be very funny and irreverent, even about the Arhat, and you would enjoy that, with your wicked sense of humor that you inherited from my sly father. From almost the time you could toddle and babble you used to poke fun at me a bit, mimicking my expressions, I was such a serious mother, so earnestly playing with my doll, my poor paperback copy of Spock consulted absolutely to tatters the way people's Bibles used to be.

  Of course I was amazed and chagrined to hear that your father is flying to England to see you. In all the years of our marriage I could never persuade him to take the time off to.go to Europe with me, except that disastrous trip to Florence, when he couldn't find the Uffizi or any place to park the car we had rented and clung to the strange idea that The Last Supper should be somewhere nearby and complained he couldn't sleep because of all the motor scooters echoing off all those stone walls—it became my fault because I could fall asleep—I was so tired after all day of trailing around behind him getting lost every minute and assuring him that the Italians weren't cheating him as much as he thought, I could have slept in an auto-body shop. Even with the Cape house that you and your friends enjoyed so much (remember all those potato chips!) his idea seemed to be to park me in it among all those gloomy pines whose needles everybody's bare feet kept tracking into the house while he stayed up in Boston-ministering to the sick and, I'm afraid, to the healthy too. He is of course your father and you must love him. Love him if you must, but don't show him my letters. I very absurdly keep feeling guilty about this rented car of mine that disappeared when I arrived here and I know is costing our charge card forty-five dollars a day at least. His ability to instill guilt in me was always tremendous, don't let him do it to you. His very courtship began in the odor of guilt I was supposed to feel over a few dates with this sweet shy boy Myron Stern and, looking back at it, I see that Charles took up right where my parents left off, as enforcers of the stale old order. I do hope we never struck you as such ogres as our parents appeared to us. They bad to, I suppose, since they had all these imaginary ogres leaning over them—not just the Russians but outsiders of any sort who might push or tempt them and their children into falling off the creaky old bandwagon of respectability. Well, your mother has done gone and fallen.

  But I'm letting my "wiggles" run away with me. I am so happy, darling. This A-frame looks directly across the flat rooftop of the Chakra mall at the scrubby rocky hills that separate us from the territory on the north, where a lot of our legal trouble comes from. The rocks have this strange soft globby look and the Saguaro cactuses instead of being green and formidable as I pictured are weathered and blackened and battered like rather pathetic old giants. You rarely see one in good condition. A hummingbird comes to visit the little cactus flowers in the rock garden Alinga and Nitya made in the shade of this hairy old box elder. It's lovely to sit out here in the evening cool before dinner, feeling serene and changeless purusha underneath and at the beginning of all things and thinking of you in wet green England with its meadows and mossy spires and iron fences and layer upon layer of the human presence—generations, each doing their busy little bit to cover purusha up. You can talk to your father when he comes about the expenses of your jaunt to Holland—he has total charge of the family finances now, when he never so much as balanced a checkbook before in his life. I did all that for him, without pay and without thanks. He has all the worldly possessions we once supposedly shared, and I live here as free and as poor as the gray-throated flycatchers that dip about in the lengthening lavender shadows—poorer, since I'm not quick enough to catch flies in my bill. In my day, of course, a young man would either pay for such an excursion as the one Jan proposes or else not invite the young lady to come on it. I must leave it to your judgment, to what extent it is still true that a young woman compromises and cheapens herself by openly lending herself to the companionship of young men, with all that that implies. Boys pretend to scoff at such things but I don't think they do really—they like us to be pure and at their mercy or else whores who needn't trouble their consciences. But whores at least get paid. To me you are a pearl of great price whose value will never diminish, but, then, I am your intensely loving

  Mother

  June 8

  Vikshipta—

  Your conduct toward me during meditation today was unforgivable. It is one thing to "let the garbage out of your system" and another to spew it all over another person. Our relationship was always somewhat primitive and tinged with your acculturated hysteria and sadism but your remarks spoken before the entire appalled group were beyond all bounds. I am no doubt the humblest of fledgling sannyasins; the other person, however, whom you named in your grotesque fit of jealousy and abuse is close enough to the Arhat, I believe, to see you removed from your present pseudo-psychiatric position of petty tyranny and stationed instead for your own therapy in the farthest, hottest artichoke field, where the Sachchidananda can just barely be coaxed to insert its trickles. I will not mention this degrading incident to her. In return for my tact I ask—demand—respect, restraint, and relinquishment from you.

  Sincerely,

  Kundalini

  June 15

  Dear Mother—

  '"Please don't send me any more trashy clippings from the Miami and Fort Lauderdale papers. It is sensationalist untruth based on third-hand rumors, by reporters who wouldn't know a spiritual value if it came and bit them on the ankle. If Charles hadn't somehow found out where I was and told you and you hadn't told all your neighbors they wouldn't be upsetting you by showing you all these stupid clippings. There are no orgies here. There is just love in its many forms. The only hot tubs are for religious purposes, to give sensory-deprivation drills and to encourage people already inclined that way to have out-of-body experiences. If you knew anything about yoga or Buddhism you would know the idea is to get out of the body for good, not to achieve physical pleasure. The state we all strive for here is perfect indifference. As to the Arhat's legal troubles back in India, which these so-called "investigative reporters" keep digging up, any government now has so many rules and regulations that if the officials get it in for you they can hound you into jail or out of the country if they want, as happened in his case. It's the same sad story here. The immigration people and the land-use technocrats and the local ranchers' hired legal guns are doing everything to crush our beautiful experiment in non-competitive living. The Arhat preaches peace and serenity in a world whose economy is based on war and agitation. The commercials on all those shows you poison your mind watching all the time (did you get the packet of the Arhat's pamphlets I sent you?—try for starters Transcending Abbinivesba: Beyond the Will to Live, or maybe the one on the three gunas and the fifteen sub-modalities, to give you a necessary frame of reference)—what are they all doing (the commercials) but agitating you to want somethin
g you don't have? Not you personally—you should have all the things you want and need, thanks to Daddy and both my grandfathers, not to mention all the ancestors before thenv piling up earthly goods to signify divine election—but people in general, the American people. No other people in the world is expected to get as whipped up over wanting as we are. The consumer society needs people in a constant state of material agitation but not so much so that the agitated people violate others' property rights—if you can't hold on to a thing you have less motive to acquire it, and that's what drugs and all the crime with them are doing, de-materializing America to an extent. That's why every city keeps a police force the size of an army, to keep the wanting and buying feasible. Our police force does nothing but guard our fences and screen visitors. People at peace within themselves and non-attached from material things don't steal and don't need laws. We do what we want, but under the Arhat's gorgeous influence we all want the same thing—his love and approval. One of your articles, I forget which—I got so mad I threw the whole batch into the shredder the office has here at the back, in case the federal authorities ever descend—called us brainwashed yuppie slaves but the fact is work is worship for us, and when you are in the right space spiritually the more you give the more you have. It's even in the Bible but no Christian believes it any more.