“Max Factor Instant Bronze,” she says firmly.
“If I could get bronzed from a tube at CVS, why did we do this?” I sigh and stare at my mottled complexion. “What a disaster.”
“Look on the bright side,” says Bellini, the same woman who saw husband potential in an ex-con. “At least you didn’t get sunburned.”
At my office the next morning, I sneak frequent peeks in my compact mirror, trying to decide if I look more like a raccoon or early Michael Jackson. Eventually, I turn my attention to something even more distasteful—a file folder on my desk, filled with a stack of pictures. I quickly flip through them. Naked woman. Naked man and woman. Naked man and woman copulating.
“Eww,” I blurt out. “This isn’t what I needed to see before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.”
The beefy man across the desk from me goes to cross his arms in front of his chest, but his too-tight suit pulls against his hefty arms and he settles for putting his palms flat out in front of him. Joe Diddly may be the most celebrated private investigator on the East Coast, but evidence suggests he’s been spending too much time staking out Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Pretty good work,” he says triumphantly. “I got him, didn’t I?”
“Definitely,” I agree. “But unfortunately the guy you got was our client.”
Joe reaches for one of the eight by twelve Kodachrome blowups, showing our client, Charles Tyler, being straddled by a young redheaded woman who works for him at the publicity department of Alladin Films—the very same colleague he claimed he’d never even met for a Frappuccino. Maybe so, but something frothy is definitely going on.
“You told me to follow the redhead, Melina Marks,” Joe says, reaching into his briefcase for a white donut box. So I was wrong. He eats Krispy Kremes. He slides the box across the table and after taking a moment to choose, I reach for a chocolate one glazed with sprinkles.
“We wanted some information on her personal life, but not this,” I say, delicately taking a bite. “Let me explain. Mr. Tyler’s being sued for sex discrimination by a woman who works for him named Beth Lewis. Beth’s colleague—the redhead Melina—got a promotion Beth thought she deserved. She claims that Melina only got the job because she was screwing their boss, Mr. Tyler.”
Joe yawns. “That’s not a case, it’s a catfight. Sounds to me like Beth is just pissed that Tyler was sleeping with the other girl instead of her. Maybe she wanted her own shot at him. Think the guy’s that good in bed?”
Dutifully, I take the photos, so I can answer Joe’s question. One picture captures a particularly gymnastic contortion with the redhead’s shapely legs wrapped around Mr. Tyler’s neck. Looks to me like she’s the one with the talents, but then I realize this is all beside the point.
“If what Beth claims is true, our client’s in a lot of trouble,” I say.
“Why?” asks Joe. “If there were a law against sleeping with people you work with, who’d ever go to work?”
“There is a law,” I say in my best legalese. “The California Supreme Court just ruled that workers can sue if a colleague who’s sleeping with the boss is shown preferential treatment.”
“Preferential, shmeferential. Anyway, we live in New York,” he says, licking chocolate off his finger.
I laugh, deciding that instead of educating him, I should try to get Joe and eleven of his brethren on our jury.
He pats the stack of photos. “Well, you wanted me to follow Melina and get you some background. I did. Sorry it’s not what you expected.”
“Definitely not what we expected. Mr. Tyler swore to my boss Arthur he was innocent.”
Joe pauses and looks at me curiously, a new idea clearly crossing his mind. “So you and your boss, Arthur . . .” he says, wagging his finger back and forth. “You two ever do the hokey-pokey?”
I laugh. “Only at his three-year-old’s birthday party.”
Joe shrugs, then stands up to stretch his oversize frame. With his job done and me not supplying any good gossip, he tosses the now-empty box of doughnuts into the wastebasket. “By the way, tough break that your husband left you. Want me to follow him? No charge. Be my pleasure.”
I make a face. “Thanks, but I already know what he’s doing. I don’t need to see it in black and white.”
“Or color either?” he jokes.
I shoot him a look, wondering if he’s making a veiled reference to my streaked tan. But then I decide I’m being oversensitive. “How’d you know about my husband?”
“I’m a detective. I know everything.”
He gets up and paces around the room, then looks me up and down appreciatively.
“You’ll be dating again in no time,” Joe says. “When you meet a new guy, let me know and I’ll do a background check.”
“Thanks, but no new guys on the horizon,” I say, and then I hesitate. “But how about an old guy? If I want to find somebody I haven’t seen in twenty years. Think you could help with that?”
“You don’t need me,” Joe says, trying to button his suit jacket around his ample midsection. “A dozen online search engines can find anybody, anywhere, in a second.”
“I tried, but the guy’s name is Barry Stern. Type it in and a million people come up. I don’t know if the Barry Stern I want is the neurosurgeon in Bel Air, the plastic surgeon in Boca, or the plumbing supplier in Brooklyn.”
Joe comes back to sit down again. He takes out a dog-eared spiral notebook from his jacket pocket. Nice old-fashioned touch. And given his retro sexual politics, I wouldn’t expect him to have a Palm Pilot.
I quickly fill Joe in on my idea of getting in touch with all my old boyfriends. I tell him about Eric, and then explain that I want to get in touch with Barry Stern, who I met one summer in a youth hostel, back-packing across Europe. We went off the next day and traveled together for four weeks, our student Eurail Passes making us feel like we owned the world. In Gaudi’s park in Barcelona, we wandered in awe, admiring the serpentine mosaics, and in Florence, I had my first gelato at Vivoli’s café, just off the Piazza Santa Croce. It tasted nothing like the Dairy Queen cones I was raised on. Barry loved art, and took me from museum to museum. At the Uffizi, we stood in front of Botticelli’s
The
Birth of Venus
and the long-haired, brilliant Barry regaled me with a story of how the artist had denounced his own glorious masterpiece late in life, regretting that he had painted anything so secular.
“I had a poster of her hanging in my bedroom as a teenager,” said Barry, staring at the naked goddess with the swirling flaxen hair. I’d nodded approvingly. At least one boy in America hadn’t gone to sleep every night under a picture of Farrah Fawcett.
“She’s beautiful,” I said admiringly.
“She is. But not as beautiful as you.”
He’d kissed me then, a long, sweet passionate kiss, and I knew that Venus, the goddess of love, had done her job.
Now as I finish up my romantic reminiscence, Joe jots down a few notes. Professional that he is, he offers no reaction. Like any good psychotherapist—or a saleswoman at Versace who hears you’re a size fourteen—he listens but doesn’t raise an eyebrow.
“Did you ever see Barry after that?” he asks.
“No, he was still traveling. He went on to India and I had to get back to New York to start law school. We exchanged letters for a while, and suddenly they stopped. I kept writing, but I didn’t hear back. I never knew why.”
“Still have the letters?” Joe asks.
“I don’t know. They’re probably somewhere in the attic.” I make a face, thinking about the boxes that I should have cleared out years ago.
“If you find anything that might be helpful, let me know,” he says. He tucks the notebook back in his breast pocket, which means he won’t be able to button the jacket again. Then Joe leans over my desk to close the folder of pictures from the Tyler case. He leaves his hand on top of it, tapping a warning finger. “Put these in a safe place. You don’t want anybody seeing them who shouldn’t.”
“Of course,” I say.
“And sorry for bringing you information about your client you didn’t want to know. Sometimes when you go digging around in things, you find something different from what you bargained for.”
I don’t get up to my attic until the next night, and when I do, I bump my head immediately on a low-hanging rafter. I rub my forehead and look around at the dusty boxes of yellowed paperback books, broken lamps that I’ll never rewire, and grubby garment bags that hold my once-favorite dresses in sizes six to fourteen, representing years of yoyoing between pizza binges and Slim-Fast diets.
I duck and carefully take a few steps toward the Footwear Hall of Fame—two dozen pair of tiny red and blue Keds lined up on an old bookcase, all the shoes Adam and Emily wore until they were five. Next to them are the boxes containing every scrap of paper the children ever fingerpainted or put a crayon to, which I’m saving to donate to their future presidential libraries. But I’m never giving away the card Adam made one Mother’s Day with a purple sun, a green flower, and the words
I lov momy
. Now he gets all A’s at Dartmouth, but his spelling hasn’t really improved.
I crouch down next to the huge wicker trunk that served as my first coffee table in my first apartment. I tentatively open it, knowing that over the years I made it the receptacle for everything I didn’t know where else to store. I push aside the handheld mixer that I’m pretty sure doesn’t work anymore and the box of earrings whose mates are long lost. I always figured I’d wear them as pins. And look at this—I saved Bill’s mother’s recipe for her famous lemon cake. Next time I see her, I can finally tell her the truth. It’s dry and inedible, just like her Thanksgiving turkey.
I dig around and suddenly something sharp slices into me.
“Shit!” I say, pulling back my stinging hand. I wrap my cut thumb with the edge of my T-shirt and hold it tightly until the bleeding is stanched. I look into the trunk for the offending object and spot it immediately: the colorful blown-glass perfume bottle that was Bill’s first gift to me. Years ago I accidentally broke the stopper, creating a sharp, jagged edge, but I couldn’t throw it away. Damn Bill. Even when he’s not around, he’s hurting me.
I gingerly lift out the bottle and rummage more carefully through the trunk. And bingo. There, toward the bottom, is a small stack of thin blue paper, held together by a crumbling, stretched-out elastic band. Just seeing the long-forgotten aerograms that we once used for transAtlantic letters causes a nostalgic pang. I carefully unfold one. The paper is all but translucent and Barry’s writing is teeny-tiny, so he can fit all the stories he wants to tell me onto one prepaid self-folding sheet. I run back down the stairs to the first floor to get my reading glasses and rush back up. In the dim light, I sit cross-legged on the splintery attic floor, though why I didn’t bring the letters downstairs to a comfortable chair beats me. Nothing seems to be able to leave this attic.
In the first missive, Barry is at Heathrow Airport, waiting for his flight to India. He misses me passionately and I will always be his Venus. Next letter, he’s been in Agra for almost a week and describes the Taj Mahal:
“. . . the perfect symmetry, the ethereal luminescence, the sheer scale.
It was built as a monument to love, and I’d build no less for you.”
Wow, that’s nice. I could be the eighth Wonder of the World.
But by letters three and four, my pull isn’t quite so monumental. Now Barry’s aerograms are filled with stories about prayer processions, rock-cut shrines, and a temple whittled out of the side of a mountain. He’s made a pilgrimage to the Ganges to cleanse his soul in the holy waters, and he was just a little disappointed because some of the other pilgrims, joining him knee-deep in the river, were there to do their laundry. Barry also tells me about some great guru he’s thinking of finding. He doesn’t mention if he’s the one who inspired the Beatles or some lesser-known guy who takes on acolytes who haven’t gone platinum.
In the fifth letter, Barry has his journey planned. He’ll go by rickshaw to the edge of town and then take a goat-drawn cart as far as possible into the hills. After that, he’s planning on hiking for however long it takes to the guru’s mountain shrine.
And that’s where the letter trail ends.
I take off my glasses, misty-eyed at thinking of Barry, barely a year or two older than my Adam is now, so hopeful, so idealistic. Back then, Barry and I both thought we were wise and grown-up, incredibly knowledgeable about life. Little did we know how much we still had to learn.
Back all those years ago, I was heartbroken when Barry stopped writing. At first, all I could think about was how hurt I felt, but then I started to worry about him. Did something dreadful occur in the mysterious hills of India? Did Barry run out of water on his hike? Was he abducted by marauding tribesmen? Could he have fallen off the goat cart? I thought about it often, but I never knew.
Ten days later, Joe Diddly has the answer.
Chapter SIX
NOBODY HAS ANSWERED the phone at this place in the three weeks I’ve been calling, but Joe Diddly swore this was Barry Stern’s current address. As long as Arthur needed me in San Francisco to take a deposition, I figured I might as well drive the extra seventy miles to the old Carmelite monastery. After my scenic trip through the hills, I pull up and see a sign for “Heavenly Spirit Retreat Center.” I must be here. Either that, or I’ve died and Saint Peter’s given the nod and passed me on through.
As I step out of the car into the bright sunshine, I smooth the skirt of the navy blue suit I’m still wearing from my morning in court. Now I wish I’d changed in the bathroom of the 7-Eleven where I stopped to pick up lunch—a box of Pringles, a bag of Doritos, and a greasy hot dog with everything on it. I’m sorry about those onions now, too.
I’ve already called Arthur to say that the deposition I took in the Tyler case wasn’t encouraging. Beth Lewis’s new boss on the West Coast, where she moved after leaving Alladin Films, claimed she was a perfect employee. Beth herself was calm and unshakable in her assertion that Mr. Tyler had no reason other than a personal one to pass her over.
Since there’s nothing I can do about that problem now, I put it to the back of my mind and follow a row of slightly scraggly trees that line a grassy entranceway. I wouldn’t quite call it a lawn—brown patches seem to outnumber green ones, and the clumps of crabgrass outnumber everything. But pretty wildflowers dot the landscape and I see a glistening pond off in the distance.
Turning in the other direction, I spot three people and I hurriedly walk over to them.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Do you know where I could find the main house?”
The two women abruptly pull back and walk briskly away. Is my onion breath really that bad? The man doesn’t answer me either, but he pauses briefly and jerks his head to the left.
“I’m looking for the main house,” I repeat.
He jerks his head twice to the left. Either he has a mild case of Tourette’s or he’s trying to tell me something. Probably the latter, because he motions for me to follow him, which I do. We arrive at a large stone house and go inside to a bright, welcoming room. Two dozen people are scattered around, all barefoot and dressed in loose-fitting pants. Some are in little groups, holding hands, and everyone is sitting cross-legged on thin tatami mats. At least I think that’s what they’re called. Or maybe I’m confused and tatami is that sashimi I like.
For several moments, I stand bewildered, not sure what to do. Then someone catches my eye and glances toward an empty mat. When I don’t move, he raises his hand slightly and makes a small gesture for me to sit down.
Okay, this is the Heavenly Spirit Retreat Center. Good guess says I’ve wandered into a meditation session. I slip off my pumps and plop onto a mat, glad that my skirt is pleated but wishing I hadn’t worn panty hose. In fact, I often wish I wasn’t wearing panty hose.
The woman next to me has her fingers tented together in a prayer-like position. Her eyes are closed and she has a peaceful expression on her face. The man on my left has his hands on his knees and is staring unblinkingly at his toes. I notice that both of my neighbors have perfectly squared shoulders and straight backs. I don’t know what this meditating stuff does for your soul, but it certainly seems to improve your posture.
The room is silent and nobody moves. I decide to close my own eyes and concentrate on a happy memory. Let’s see. There was my wedding day. Nope, take that off the happy memories list. Maybe the April afternoon strolling along the Seine in Paris? No, the man holding my hand was Bill. Something good that happened with the kids? A picture comes into my mind of Emily and Adam at the zoo when they were toddlers. Adam is jumping up and down to imitate the orangutans and Emily is mimicking their funny faces. I try not to laugh out loud. Then I remember Emily entertaining the monkeys with cartwheels, and a giggle escapes. It’s just a little one, but it ricochets around the silent room like a gunshot. I look up, humiliated, but to my surprise, nobody has even batted an eyelash. Literally. What concentration. If you harnessed all the focused energy in this room, you could probably light up San Francisco for a week.
I have a feeling that I’m not supposed to be thinking about monkeys, gunshots, or California’s energy crisis. Plus, my foot has fallen asleep and pins and needles are running up my leg. But they’re nothing compared to the tingle I feel a moment later.
A gong sounds and suddenly the mood around me intensifies. There’s a stir in the room as my fellow retreaters begin to hum. Quickly the hum builds to a drone and the drone to a chant:
om om om
. The buzz rings out like a chiming bell—or maybe a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.
The chant heralds the arrival of a man in flowing pants and a white caftan, who enters from a side door. The revered leader of the retreat— Rav Jon Yoma Maharishi.
Formerly known as Barry Stern.
Unwittingly, I grin and give him a little wave, but, fortunately, he doesn’t notice. I’d laughed when Joe Diddly told me that the nice, arty, intellectual boy I once knew had become “a spiritual leader and teacher of enlightenment, merging the philosophies of the early Chan masters, the Zen Buddhists, and Swami Chinduh.” (Why not throw in the philosophies of Dear Abby and the Reverend Al Sharpton just to be safe?) But Barry must be doing something right. The minute he walked in, my karma definitely improved.
Barry’s audience—aka Rav Jon Yoma Maharishi’s acolytes—are gazing at him in rapture. The chanting has continued and is only getting louder. I also stare at him intently. I don’t mean to be harsh, but Barry hasn’t held up over the years quite as well as Eric. I’m sure his soul is pure but his body is a little paunchy. Even under the caftan, I can see a bulging belly. I guess his retreats don’t involve fasting.
Barry raises his hands and the chanting stops.
“Our satsang session now begins,” he says in a soft voice barely above a whisper. “As you know, I will break the transforming spiritual silence of this weekend retreat only for this one ten-minute session.”
A silent retreat would explain the guy with the jerking head—and the women who walked away from me. But only ten minutes to talk all weekend? My Sprint plan’s a lot better.
“I will take questions on the pursuit of truth, the search for enlightenment, and the quest for selfhood,” the Maharishi says. That seems like a lot to cram into ten minutes, and then he adds, “We can also explore the joys of oneness.”
I wouldn’t mind exploring the joys of twoness, since current experience tells me that oneness leaves something to be desired. But the woman next to me is nodding vigorously.
“Maharishi, I’m seeking cosmic consciousness. Can you enlighten us on how you found it?”
“Hmmmmm,” says Barry, I’m not sure if he’s thinking or chanting. “My journey began on a mountaintop and suddenly I felt I was floating in infinite space. All boundaries disappeared and as the doors of perception opened, there were no walls to hold me in.”
As far as I know, there are never any walls on mountaintops, at least until the condo developers move in.
But the room is enthralled, and Barry continues. “I saw that life is One, that all the people in the universe, seen and unseen, known and unknown, experienced and not experienced, conscious and not conscious, glorious and not glorious . . .”
Yeah, yeah, all of us. Pretty and not pretty. Smart and not smart. Members of the Chaddick Tennis Club, not members of the Chaddick Tennis Club. Let’s move it along.
“. . . that everyone and everything that exists and has ever existed is really Love. And in its truest form, it provides an intensity that is joyous, transcendent, and almost overwhelmingly pleasurable for the human body.”
Am I reading something into this? Sounds to me like he’s saying that the goal of enlightenment is better orgasms. If the Sunday school pastor when I was growing up gave sermons like this, I might have spent more time in church.
A man in the middle of the room must think he’s at a presidential news conference because he raises a finger and says, “Follow-up question, Rav?”
I nervously look at my watch. These people may be trying to get in touch with their inner peace, but I’ve been trying for weeks now to get in touch with Barry. The vow of silence must extend to the telephone. We’ve used up six minutes on just this one question. Only four more minutes and we’re back to charades.
The follow-up query seems to take forever, and Rav Jon Yoma Maharishi’s answer even longer. Now the tension in the room is palpable. With time running out, all the om-ing can’t stop the anxiety from rising as people try to get in their questions.
“Is there a quick way to the bliss of Self-Discovery?” someone asks.
“Can you outline the top three tools for hopping on a spiritual path?” asks a man. He’s clearly a corporate executive expecting to find the answer to life in a PowerPoint presentation.
Before Barry can answer, another exec-type shoots out, “Do you have a program for people who only have weekends to transcend their Ego?”
Fifteen seconds to go. Concerned about my own ego, I boldly stand and blurt out the only question that’s on my mind.
“Do you remember me, Barry?”
Three dozen people turn around and stare. A few of them murmur the name “Barry” quizzically, over and over. I don’t blame them. They’ve probably paid a lot of money to hear the Wisdom of the Rav Jon Yoma Maharishi. The Wisdom of Barry doesn’t sound nearly as valuable.
Barry looks in my direction, but I don’t see even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. I should be insulted, but instead I’m pissed. Come on, buddy. Eric said I haven’t changed a bit.
The chanting begins again and the Maharishi faces the group, bows, and takes his cue to glide solemnly out of the room. I start to rush after him, but when I get outside, he seems to have disappeared into thin air. Did the change from Barry to Rav come with a magic Harry Potter cape?
I start to head back to my car to leave, but then I stop. I came all this way to talk to Barry, and while talking doesn’t seem to be a popular sport around here, I’m not going to give up. And as long as I’m here, I might as well try to get some enlightenment.
I’d like to go rest in my room but realize I don’t have one. I wander again toward the main area and see that everybody has come outside. I find my friend with the jerking head and make exaggerated motions to him suggesting that I need to register. When he doesn’t get that, I lean my head to the side and close my eyes, hoping he’ll understand that I could use a place to sleep. But he takes it the wrong way. He puts his arm around me, strokes my shoulder, and points toward his own room. This could be my one chance to experience the silent fuck, but I let it pass right by. I shake my head vigorously to tell him no.
For the rest of the afternoon, I roam the grounds like everybody else, figuring I’ll try to give this spiritual quest thing a whirl.
Om, Om,
Om
, I mumble to myself. Gosh, that’s boring.
Rome, Home, Dome, Nome
. A little better.
Barry, Barry, Barry
. Maybe I can conjure him up.
And damn if a man doesn’t suddenly appear in front of me. Not Barry, but then, I’m only a novice. What woman wouldn’t be proud to summon up a man, any man, on command? This one—bald, tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed all in white—crosses his arms in front of his chest, looking surprisingly like Mr. Clean. He raises his hand and beckons me forward, wanting me to come with him. Setting off, Mr. Clean walks briskly ahead of me and I follow four paces behind. We go past the pond to a narrow path in the woods and I see a small cottage at the end.
And Barry is standing out front.
Mr. Clean goes inside and closes the door, but Barry stays where he is. Once I’m standing in front of him, I’m not sure exactly what to do. If he were really just Barry, I’d give him a hug. But do you touch Rav Jon Yoma Maharishi? Maybe I kiss his ring. No, that’s the other guy. Barry takes the lead and puts both his hands on my head. Am I being blessed, or is he going to give me a kiss?
Barry steps back and slowly spreads his arms in a welcoming gesture. When I saw him this afternoon in the meditation room, I halffigured that his performance was just that, a show. But even up close, he exudes an aura of peaceful calm and serenity. And something in his deep gray eyes tells me that he recognizes me after all.
“Is it okay if we talk?” I ask, keeping my voice low. Maybe speaking doesn’t count if we keep it under a certain decibel level.
Holding his hand against his chest, he shakes his head—but then pointing toward me, he nods almost imperceptibly. So I can talk and he won’t. Sounds like a lot of marriages.
He sits down on a rock, and I squeeze in next to him on the hard, uncomfortable perch. But Barry seems perfectly at ease. I know his consciousness is on another plane. I didn’t realize his butt was, too.
“So when did you become a Maharishi?” I ask brightly. Oh, great, I sound like an idiot. I haven’t spoken for one afternoon, and I’ve already lost all my conversational skills.
Barry smiles beatifically. Obviously I need to work a little harder to get an answer.
“Five years ago?” I ask, persisting now in a question that I really have no interest in. “Ten? When you were in India right after I knew you?”
He doesn’t give any indication of a response, but I’m not giving up. “Here’s what we’ll do. Just stomp your leg once when I get the right answer.” I demonstrate, stamping my own leg a couple of times, like a horse.
Despite himself, Barry laughs. Now I take it as a personal challenge to get him to say something, anything. I try to remember what Adam did when he was nine to get the stone-faced Buckingham Palace guard to finally break down and grumble, “Go away, kid.” If the Queen knew he’d talked, the guard would probably have been beheaded. What’s the worst that could happen to Barry? He gets booted out of Nirvana?
But I don’t have to try as hard as I thought. Fate does the work for me. Mr. Clean cracks the door open and holds out a portable phone.