The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (19 page)

Anne laughed.

“I stopped right in the middle of the road. I looked around. I said ‘Huh?’ And she kept on talking, really making fun of me, but in a kind of easygoing way. And I finally got it, that she was inside my mind.”

“Yes,” said Anne.

“Hallelujah!” said Suni, grinning. “Girl, I haven’t looked back since.”

“Well, you see,” said Anne, sitting down on a convenient log alongside the trail. “I fell in love with Phillip. Besides, black men like Jason, who were of interest to me, were busy sampling elsewhere.” She smiled, but it was surprisingly bitter, considering.

“But he loved you, black men loved black women, all the time!” said Suni. “His loving me didn’t mean he stopped loving you all.”

“I knew that by the way he was there beside me every day,” said Anne, sardonically.

“But your husband, Phillip, was beside you every day,” said Suni, exasperated. “A white man, remember? What did you want, both of them?”

Anne laughed. “Maybe,” she said. Because it seemed to her that that is what white women had. Their own men and hers if they wanted him. She said this aloud. To which Suni snorted. “But that’s what you had. Your own man—even though he was with me, you didn’t just drop out of his universe—and (she could not say ‘my man’ since she hated to think of white men as connected to her) a white man.”

How humiliating that their lives were so affected by men in general and by Jason in particular. Simply to cease thinking about men and to run off with each other was a thought that delighted some part of both of them. It would serve men, Jason for instance, right. And yet, the freedom of that choice, at least to Anne, was largely illusory. It was only her femaleness that she felt she related to in Suni. Her whiteness (not the color itself but the attitudes developed because of it, no matter how assiduously Suni sought to tame herself) she could not abide.

Arrogance: “I feel secure in my marriage,” she said. “Jason always comes back to me.”

Which meant that, as a black woman, Anne had no chance at all of winning him away.

And of course she preferred to think “winning him away” was the furthest thing from her mind.

You not fooling no one but yourself, said Grandma.

And so she had “won” him away and they had spent a decade and a half deconstructing every impediment to their intimacy.
Racism and colorism were scrutinized. Sexism confronted head-on. Classism studied as if in a class. At the end of this process, which taught them more than could be imagined prior to daring it, they realized they had other areas of study elsewhere, and with other mates. Twenty years later Jason was happily married to someone else, not either of them!

Suni was deep into spirituality and followed a guru, and Anne was having a passionate though platonic affair with a very young boy. A man, but young, boyish.

The minute he walked into my house I knew something was up, said Anne.

She was driving them to the local ashram and was looking forward to meeting, or at least hearing, Suni’s guru.

Suni turned to her expectantly.

He was sooo
cute
! said Anne. He’d come to see someone who used to live in our house, a former classmate. That person was long since gone; I’d lived in the house nine years. Still, we seemed to be who we were both really expecting to see. He sort of rocked back on his heels. I stood in the doorway staring at him as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t have explained it then. I thought it was just how dear he looked. A smallish young man. Big dark eyes, a guileless grin. Nice teeth. Curly, curly hair. Less than half my age.

I think you turn here, said Suni, as they approached a light.

Right, said Anne.

All my cells sort of woke up.

Wow, said Suni, that’s how I felt the first time I heard Gurumayi. I didn’t even see her. A friend gave me a tape of a talk she gave at the ashram last year. It felt like water to my desert. I hadn’t realized how arid I was. How stuck and sort of floundering.

I know, said Anne. Isn’t it the pits? How we go along feeling half alive sometimes; not even half.

We’re asleep, said Suni. Just walking and talking, eating and shitting. Sound asleep.

And we have to be that way, of course, said Anne. It’s the human equivalent of fallowness.

Spiritual hibernation, said Suni.

But I hated it, said Anne. I used to hate it so much; it was such a state of numbness, interspersed of course with cliff-hanging depressions. There were times when I was tempted to try to reconnect with Jason. But every time we talked about maybe getting back together, I burst into tears. We’d burned all our material. Every scrap of the stuff we needed to do together.

That’s the great thing about Jason, said Suni, remembering her marriage. You could finish your stuff with him.

It is a good thing, isn’t it? I have had lovers and friends you couldn’t finish anything with. Old shit just kept hanging and hanging. She made a wry face at this repugnant description.

Suni made a disgusted sound.

The first time I saw Gurumayi I fell in love with her, she said. She was so beautiful, and so young! She looked like a girl.

I never knew there were women gurus, said Anne.

Neither did I, said Suni. But when I saw her, I thought: Of course. How natural. For sure I wouldn’t have been as interested in listening to a man. And she’s teaching me so much about what’s important. Happiness. Compassion. Ecology of the soul. How meditation is as necessary as changing your bed linen and flossing.

I can’t believe how life keeps pulling back the veil! said Anne.

What’s his name? asked Suni.

Adam, of course, said Anne, laughing.

What’s so funny? asked Suni.

It’s just perfect, that after all these years Life sends me a man to love who doesn’t seem to have any kind of baggage. It isn’t sexual between us, it isn’t romantic, he doesn’t need me to provide housing. He rides a bicycle everywhere. In a way, he feels like my first man.

Is he gay? asked Suni.

I’ve no idea, said Anne. He’s certainly
fun
. I’ve danced more with Adam than I’ve danced with anyone in my whole life. Listened to more music. Gone on more bike rides. Sometimes I feel so happy with him I have to ask myself: How did this happen? What does it mean?

You should see a psychic, said Suni.

There was a long pause while both women concentrated on the traffic that swirled around them and the cozily lit shops lining San Pablo Avenue.

It wasn’t as mysterious as I’d thought, said Anne, almost under her breath. She wasn’t sure she should say this to Suni, who, in the old days, according anyway to Jason, had taken a dim view of things supernatural. No. I believe Adam and I have known each other a long time. Maybe always. That he is my soul’s recognition of a child I aborted twenty-five years ago.

Really
, said Suni, interested.

Yes, said Anne. I had the longest talk with the spirit of that child, after I let it go. I didn’t know enough and was too scared and desperate anyway to talk to it
before
I let it go. I was barely out of my teens. Quite ignorant. But over the years, as I’ve understood more, I’ve wanted to connect with it. Not so much to apologize, but to explain my terrified and impoverished circumstances,
the fact that I was abandoned by his father, who was also young and scared, and to express my grief and love. He had a beautiful little spirit. I have imagined him in every stage as he was growing, or would have been growing, up. He would have been named Adam, too.

Something serious is going on in the Universe, said Suni, thoughtfully.

Yes, said Anne. And one of the most serious things for me has been the understanding that the Universe is not that interested in punishing us. Every move we make is simply part of its reflection.

I’d always heard “You must be careful what you ask for,” said Suni. But I didn’t understand it, except, maybe, negatively. But really, Life is definitely open to giving you whatever you sincerely ask for. Though maybe not in a form you can immediately recognize it in.

You know, she said, how I am always collecting things that I find on the ground?

Yes, said Anne. That’s an image of you that stays with anyone who’s known you for long.

Ah, yes, said Suni. Jason used to make me put shells back in the ocean, after I’d collected so many you could barely find a spot to put your coffee cup in our house. He said it was very white. Collecting. Grabbing. Hoarding. Leaving the earth bare. She shuddered. It was a hard thing to have a black man say to me, even if he was my husband.

Anne was quiet. It had started to rain. The swish of the wipers seemed sudden and loud. She was glad she’d gotten up the nerve to call Suni, after all these years, and pleased that Suni had agreed to see her. She thought of how precious it was to be able
to know another person over many years. There was an incomparable richness in it.

So I started to think about it, and to limit my grabbing. I learned to find things, beautiful things, and not need to take them home. And then, recently, I’ve wanted to find a shark’s tooth. And every day on my walk along the beach I’ve looked for one. Now mind you, the shark’s tooth I had in mind was perfect: big, yellow, sharp. A majestic shark’s tooth.

And what did you find? asked Anne, laughing.

The most gnarly, rat’s ass of a shark’s tooth one could imagine. She laughed. But it was a shark’s tooth.

And what did you do with it? asked Anne. Fling it back?

Not on your life, said Suni, bringing the blunted, dark old thing from under her jacket, where it hung around her neck from a golden chain. If this is the shark’s tooth Life wants me to have, then by golly, this is the shark’s tooth I bloody well want!

Anne felt very close to Suni in this moment. She reached over and clasped her hand. Suni squeezed her fingers absentmindedly, but warmly, still laughing.

Some people nowadays try to make women feel guilty for having had abortions, Anne said finally. They claim the aborted fetuses are wrathful and want to harm the women who aborted them. The spirit of my child has felt just the opposite. I’ve felt his yearning to comfort me, to love and cherish me. To make me smile.

You think Adam sent Adam! said Suni.

I do, said Anne. Or rather, I think Life sent Adam. And why would Life do that? Send me a delightful young male spirit that I instantly recognized? Because Life was out there preparing such a Being for Its own purpose. But because I can appreciate what Life created, and sincerely grieved its absence in my life, I
get to enjoy it when Life,
drylongso
, just doing Its Thang, shoots it my way.

What has Grandma had to say about it? asked Suni.

Grandma is thrilled, she said, as they parked in the ashram parking lot. Grandma and I both love to dance.

This is how it happened. After many years of being happier than anyone we knew, which worried me, my partner of a dozen years and I broke up. I still loved him, in a deeply familial way, but the moments of palpable deadness occurring with ever greater frequency in our relationship warned me we’d reached the end of our mutual growth. How to end it? How to get away?

My old friend Marissa, with whom I’d been infatuated years ago in Brooklyn, came to San Francisco for a visit. She was a dyke, pure and strange, and I could never see her without a certain amount of awe. She was the most beautiful of women, shapely and brown, but she could also wire houses and fix cars. All the while speaking in the softest of voices and never showing any of her innate wildness until left alone on the dance floor. She immediately caused the other dancers to disappear and the dance floor itself to retreat until it seemed to be in a forest somewhere
and the five thousand or so years of a lackluster patriarchy fairly forgotten.

We had met while I was in a marriage with a decent, honorable man who had not danced in six or seven years, and she was living with a woman who told her what to eat, think and wear. I didn’t know this when we met, of course. Because she was an electrician and earned her own living I found her strong, independent, free. In retrospect we decided, once we’d been separated for some years from our earlier partners, we’d been infatuated with the image of each other that we needed to help us flee.