S. (30 page)

Did you know that the Jains reckon time in palyas, a palya being “a period of countless years,” and that 100,000,000 times 100,000,000 palyas equals an “ocean of years”? They say furthermore that the age before ours lasted 100,000,000,000,000 oceans of years (approximately) and saw people shrink from a thousand yards tall, with thirty-two ribs, to only nine and a half feet in height? The age was called the duhshama-sushama, which means Very Beautifully Sorrowful, and our age is simply the Sorrowful (duhshama) and will be succeeded by the last, the Sorrowfully Sorrowful (duhshama-duhshama). I give these facts (transcribing them from a book I obtained at the local bookstore, where I have a little charge account) to suggest the conceptual context in which I am presently operating, and to convey the tranquillity and serenity of my state of mind. You can see why the Jains don’t like to inhale gnats—from their perspective we are all just gnats, at best.

I have left the ashram. Midge’s gloating gleeful news and some local disillusionments made me realize that this phase of my progress was over. The love that I left you for has been sublimated—literally turned into radiant etheric vapor at a location called Sahasrara a few inches above my head. Rare Sarah, I have now become. Where I am now geographically suits my rarefied condition. I can’t give it away, lest Gilman come swooping in in a biplane with all sorts of writs and handcuffs. It is as near nowhere as you can imagine and yet somewhere, if you know what I mean. With its own little historical
distinctions, export crops, and atmospheric flavor. The flavor is in my nostrils night and day and the atmosphere rests on my skin and keeps reminding me of the time in about 1970 or ’71 (Pearl I know had begun at that Episcopalian kindergarten and was big enough so we thought we could leave her for a week with my parents—you hadn’t had a vacation since beginning internship and were thin as a rail) when we flew to Saint Martin, the French side, because I thought I could practice my French, but their accent was quite different and everybody in all the shops spoke English anyway, and in the jet down we had daiquiris, and after our second ones, what with the rum and the relief at being away from work, you got passionate and began murmuring to me all the things you were going to do to me, all the sexual things, and I kept nodding and giggling and hoping the people in the seats around us couldn’t hear, and felt the rum heating up my face; and when we got there, this perfectly darling little run-down and not especially clean hotel off the main street in Marigot, with filigreed wooden balconies and our room overlooking the quaint old cemetery full of whitewashed broken tombs and the greeny-blue violet-striped sea beyond, we did them all, we made a systematic job of it, a little high every night on wine and the liqueurs that were so cheap duty-free, and then in the mornings too, after eating the slices of green melon and the crumby hard rolls and the bitter good coffee the girl brought, the nine-o’clock sun coming in through the louvers at an angle making warm stripes on the straw rug beside the bed, and then in the mid-afternoon too, after our hours on the beach with the piña coladas for lunch at the little thatched bar there, the sun now having moved around and the room shadowy and cool with the stripes from the louvers beginning to climb the wall over in the far corner, and the noon’s sunburn settling
into our shoulders and thighs, we worked through our list, everything you had said in the airplane; and though some of the things we had never done before and when it came down to doing them you were shy of hurting or abusing me I made you go through with them, I thought you should have everything I could give because you’d been working so hard and were so boyishly thin and this was our holiday. Dear Charles, after the first nights I smelled of your semen all the time, my hands and face and between my breasts where you came that way once—nothing, not the saltwater at the beach or the soap in the shower could wash it off, this faint lingering semi-sour smell of
you
somehow worked into my pores; I wondered if other people, the slim black girls in the wristwatch shops and the waiters bending over us at the evening meal with its hibiscus on the table and little candle-bowl guttering and even the staring men hanging around at the old cement dock, could smell it—I was terrified they could but also I
liked
smelling that way, just soaked in your seed, floating along in this little faintly rancid cloud of sex smell, there in the sunshine where nobody knew us. We worked your list through, we did it all the ways we could think of or had read about in books and I felt so
married
to you, so yours, exuding this spunky aroma and aching a bit in the intimate places. I never have known why I didn’t get pregnant that time, my cycle was right and we took no precautions, I was sure we would go back having started a little brother for Pearl but it wasn’t to be—how odd when the time we
did
make a baby was one of those awful almost virginal times when you came much too soon and I didn’t come at all and we both felt embarrassed and inadequate afterwards. That week in Saint Martin I loved you so much for
trusting
me with all that seed of yours, the sperm all furiously thrashing and swimming to reach my egg, my egg
that I was made to carry, my whole intricate body and spirit simply its package and wrapping really, you didn’t hold it back as some men do to give a woman and themselves pleasure, for us it was more than pleasure, there was a rigor to it, a duty, a ruthless and thorough mutual exploitation, a union at that solemn level where I unwashably smelled—that funny helpless hollowish smell semen has—and where I would always be yours. So, with the atmosphere of that week in my mouth and nostrils and soft on my skin all day where I am now you can see why I don’t believe in divorce and brush away Midge as the bothersome gnat she is.

Days later. Prolonging the sad pleasure, the Beautifully Sorrowful. I do enjoy writing to you, old dear. Maybe it’s your silence I enjoy—no scolding word about the state of the drapes or dust in the bookcase or about the house going to pot inside while I dug in the garden or wasted half the day at yoga. You hated my yoga, but maybe Midge will lead you along the Eightfold Path. Really, it’s just stretching exercises and an attempt to still the mind, to quiet the ego and let something other than its clamoring be heard.

Now I wonder if my reactions to you and Midge haven’t been selfish and non-non-attached. After all, I
did
leave, and can’t really imagine coming back. We’ve had our Krishna-Radha week in Marigot. How old were we? I would have been twenty-six, and you twenty-eight. The perfect age to play at being gods. If there is—as various patriarchal religions keep suggesting—a divinity in whoredom, I touched it that week. I wasn’t just me, I was
you
, your sukra and my rajas indivisible. You got so brown, I remember, all but your cute pale tight fanny, and your body was like something harder than flesh,
your chest leaning above me flat and hairless like a—what? A primitive lean-to, a piece of slanty attic roof that a child likes to huddle under while it rains. That must have been behind the dream of mine that I suppose Midge played for you. She really
has
come between us, hasn’t she? In a way the Arhat never did. He belonged to my subtle body and you to my gross earthly sthula body—my real body, I suppose you’d say. I felt big enough for you both, if I can claim that without appearing immodest.

Charles, I can’t express how serene and benign I feel about you and me. Parting is an illusion. Loss is an illusion, just as is gain. We shed our skins but something naked and white and amara slithers out and is always the same. I think I eventually will go to Holland and help Pearl bear our grandchild. These Dutch brewers have at least the charm of money—guilders, isn’t it, over there? It all
—sa grossesse et tout
—seemed a little soon, but then everything does, I suppose, from being born to dying. I’ve dropped a note to Ducky asking him to try to work it out with Gilman. Did it bother you to hear on the tapes that I had a flirtation of sorts with Ducky, before he knew that he was gay? Poor Gloria, how terrible to realize that your supposed feminine charm is an unloaded gun, so to speak. There was something
challenging
about Ducky for a woman and I suppose that was it. Anyway, your flings with those flat-heeled nurses (how
can
you medical people who know so much about the body’s ins and outs still get excited making love?—or does that expertise make it more so?)
did
bother me, however lightly you took them. They were klishta. They sullied me and you—wounded us, really. Things can’t always be undone, it would seem. There is a
grain
to prakriti, an arrow of time. We get tired. Do remember and remind the despicable Gilman that whether or not this divorce goes through is to me a
matter of utter indifference. Having known the Arhat’s divine love I am not in the market (unlike needy old you) for any further attachments. I need to be still and feel now I have acquired the means to be still.

As I wrote you last spring, I have the Price salver and teapot and the Peabody flatware and candlesticks and Daddy’s Milton and Donne and Herbert and Vaughan and Marvell. You
can’t
begrudge me those, and I’ve willed them to the Houghton Library in any case. The stocks that I impulsively sold on the advice of Irving’s astrology I
do
apologize for—who would have thought the market could keep rising the nonsensical way it has? It’s the terrible trade imbalance—the Japanese and Arabs and Germans have to do
something
with all their deteriorating dollars, and so they toss them back at us. In compensation, you can have the New Hampshire land—I don’t think the Loon condos are going to come that way in this century—and I lavishly waive more than half of the assessed present value of our house and the Cape property. I would think the former would be worth a million now, with its view, so it should be easy to figure what you owe me if you and Midge have such poor taste as to want to live there, with my ghost sneaking around every corner, rose clippers in hand. I
certainly
can’t picture even so gross a duo as you two humping away in our old four-poster, so when you sell it point out to the dealer that the carving is by William Lemon of Salem and the gilding by Daggett of Boston—these names add
hundreds
to the value. The Chippendale dining table and matching eight chairs with the diamond-and-scroll back splats came from the Perkinses and should go eventually to Pearl, along with the carved sea chest that accompanied Daddy’s great-granddaddy back and forth to China countless times and the dear little blackened salt-and-pepper shakers handed down
through Mother’s mother’s mother’s people the Prynnes. The Worth things are of course yours, though I confess I would
love
to have, here in my lonely cottage by the sea, the flame-stitch wing chair I used to sit in waiting for you to come home, stitching away at those hateful to-be-monogrammed place mats your tiresome Aunt Hilda inflicted on us as a wedding present—of the twelve, I think I did only three plus half of one more
W
over the course of twenty-two years. In most wing chairs I feel slightly repressed but that flame-stitch one had just the right gentle grip. Where I am now, the winter days are about the length of spring days in New England, and for that first half-hour of the dark as I sit reading zoology or cosmology or just staring into space I catch myself listening for the grinding sound of the garage door sliding up, in obedience to its own inner eye.

Ever,
S.