Venus and Her Lover

by Becca Tzigany

  On Raven’s Wings

  Back in Taos, the yellow season came, suffusing us with its warmth. I was looking forward to hikes up into the aspen-yellow mountains when my plans abruptly changed.

  As soon as I received the phone call that my father had had a stroke, I felt an impulse to go to him. Just to be sure, I sat down at my altar to meditate, but was abruptly roused by a commotion at my window. A raven and a magpie were engaged in a tussle, black iridescent wings flapping against the glass, and they were cawing loudly. I got the message. Raven was the Native American psychopomp, the messenger from the spirit world. Within an hour my bag was packed, and James was driving top speed to get me to my flight in Albuquerque.

  Meeting my mother at the hospital, I did my best to comfort her and tend to my father, who was paralyzed on his left side and bewildered about where he was.

  “Dad, can you tell what color my shirt is?” I asked him.

  “No... unless you mean that maroon one you’re wearing,” he replied, with his wry Hungarian sense of humor still intact.

  Within a few days it became clear he was deteriorating, and I told my sisters to fly in. Having thrown The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying into my suitcase, I opened it to the Tibetan phowa practice, and began praying quietly into my father’s ear. Part of it goes like this:

  Through your blessing, grace, and guidance, through the power of the light that streams from you:

  May all my negative karma, destructive emotions,

  obscurations, and blockages be purified and removed,

  May I know myself forgiven for all the harm I may have thought and done,

  May I accomplish this profound practice of phowa, and die a good and peaceful death,

  And through the triumph of my death, may I be able to benefit all other beings, living or dead.111

  I paraphrased it into terms more understandable to my father, and whispered to him that his body was dying. When I stopped the prayer, my mother would ask me to say it again, and my aunt, my father’s sister and a devout Christian, repeated the words as best she could.

  Bending down to speak into his ear, I asked, “Dad, do you like this? Should I continue?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Dad, you know I am here to help you,” I said.

  Then, he looked into my eyes. Though he was blind in one eye and it was a struggle for him to speak, I saw his great affection for me as he said with sincere emotion, “Yes, I understand. Thank you.”

  Right then and there, he understood that my years of “crazy” spiritual seeking, my lifetime of following my heart, and my unconventional appearance now meant the world to him. And he was utterly grateful. Among those that surrounded him in those last days with their love and concern, I found myself to be the one who had the tools to accompany him in a monumental passage, the one out of this life. It felt to me just like the work I did as doula, assisting with birth.

  In that one look and those few words, all the condemnation, anger, and miscomprehension that I had received from him, melted away. Finally, he saw me for who I was, and he thanked me. What a gift!

  The next night my father left this world, surrounded by his wife and daughters gathered around the hospital bed. My sisters and I called in the extended family and set to planning the funeral.

  At the funeral reception, my eldest cousin sat down next to me, saying, “You know, this is the first time I’ve seen you with gray hair.”

  “Silver,” I corrected her.

  “Well, all right, silver. And ya know what? You look just like Great Grandma Zella. She was part Cherokee, ya know!”

  No, I didn’t know! When that Native American skeleton tumbled out of the family closet, fragments of my personality suddenly fell into place. Unlike my blond sisters, I had been born with black hair, dark brown eyes, and dark complexion: apparently a genetic throwback. No wonder I always felt so bonded with the Earth, always sought to go into Nature to listen and to feel at home. It was in my cellular memory to feel called to power spots, to places of strong mana. But of course I worked to recreate tribal ritual, whether at my home altar or in community dance halls. My indigenous soul, long familiar to me, could now claim its worldly lineage.

  Then, talking with my aunt, I was describing how similar I found the birth and death passages to be.

  “You work as a doula, Becca?” she asked. “Why, that’s what our mother did in the coal camps! You know she also was a doula?”

  No, I didn’t know! No one had ever thought it important that my grandmother had brought her traditional knowledge over from Hungary, and by the time I could have understood, she had left behind her work, as she more fully integrated into modern America. Now I understood her formidable combination of gentleness and strength. Oh, if only she knew how I was carrying on a family tradition... and what I could have learned from her!

  After the funeral, I stayed with my mother to ease the transition and help untangle the spaghetti bowl of their finances, in order to secure her income and simplify her circumstances. After six weeks in the Midwestern home of my childhood, I prepared to return to my boys in New Mexico.

  My mother thanked me for staying with her. “I could never have done all this by myself. You’ve helped me so much.”

  “See, Mom? It’s a good thing I’m a writer, isn’t it? I’m the only one with a flexible enough schedule for me to take six weeks off,” I said.

  “Well,” my mother began. “Your father and I have never understood why you didn’t choose a more normal life. Why don’t you get a real job?”

  “But, Mom, if I’d had a normal job, I wouldn’t have been able to spend this time with you. Don’t you see...?” I argued.

  But seeing her face, the judgment still etched there, I closed my mouth. I laughed and hugged her. She may never understand. But my father had, and that remained a most precious gift to me.

  Murder or Karma?

  Summer in Taos meant we could fling open the windows to air that was freshened by the summer monsoon rains. Nights were cool and redolent with sage. Thunderstorms rumbled across the high desert mesa, their great billows incandescent with internal lightning against the black night sky. Thor’s craggy finger flashed from sky to earth; I sat on the porch beholding the show, not wanting to take my eyes off the sky so as not to miss the dramatic strikes.

  It was on one such July night, the year after my father’s death, that I pulled myself back into the house to get ready for bed. Since James was not home from the studio yet, I decided to check email. There I found a brief message from a friend of Mysterious Molly’s in Thailand. The email read like a telegram:

  “Giselle met Daniel in a restaurant and shot him to death.

  She was captured by the authorities.

  Thought you’d want to know.”

  The calm of the summer’s night was shattered as if I’d just been struck by one of those lightning bolts. My thoughts left their mesa perch and flew across the ocean to steamy Thailand – it must be daytime there now. With their monsoons, Chiang Mai would be green and blooming and... Mysterious Molly (Giselle) was in jail for murder? What happened to the kids? What would happen to her?

  While still in shock, I began sleuthing through the internet for news and clues. I found a newspaper article on the shooting, with a graphic photo of a Thai woman weeping over Daniel’s face. Blood trickled out of his nose. There was also a photo of a fair-skinned woman flanked by police, and – no doubt about it – there was Mysterious Molly. Her face registered shock; her left eye wandered its gaze, and her lips were pursed grimly. The article described the sequence of events, according to eyewitnesses. Daniel and Molly met at a restaurant (the very same one where James and I had met him). The couple quarreled, and the management asked them to take it outside. They did, and in the parking lot they scuffled, a shot was fired, and Molly jumped into her van and fled. Police soon caught up with a woman at a bridg
e where she was throwing what appeared to be a revolver into the river. Daniel was DOA at the hospital. Only one bullet was found in his body, in his chest.

  In addition to Thai news releases, I turned up blogs that had attracted people who knew Daniel Dubie, particularly his many female companions. As it turns out, the “soul mate” of Mysterious Molly had bewitched others, fathering up to 17 children, according to the tally of some. All described him as charismatic, some comparing him to Charles Manson or Jim Jones. Since Daniel forged a trail of schemes bilking people out of their life savings, he went by several aliases. An FBI agent who had investigated him called him “a David Koresh-type figure” because of his claim to be the Messiah, which attracted a small cult following. Women described his jet-setting the world to help charities and holistic ventures, and his grandiose visions of bringing in a new Earth, of which they could be a part... Through the blogs, some of these women were just discovering each other. Darkly, they also shared stories of confusion over his apparently supernatural powers, coupled with psychological and physical abuse. They described his initial charm that led to his controlling every aspect of their lives, isolating and confining them, all in the name of purity and the greater good. And several referred to Molly as “his most devoted disciple.”

  In subsequent days, I would read with sympathy the account of Molly’s elder daughter taking in the other five kids, winning custody and support from the Canadian government, and how the social worker tried to counsel them as they grappled with hard realities... “Daddy’s dead?” “Mommy’s in jail?” “Mommy killed Daddy?”

  When James arrived from his studio, I read him the news.

  “It seems she shot him right in the heart – is that fitting or what?” I commented.

  “Are you saying she was justified?” James asked.

  “Well, I don’t believe murder is ever justified, but now I see that this guy had it coming,” I explained.

  “What?! You are saying it was justified!” James exclaimed.

  “No! It’s not right to kill. But he took advantage of all these women, it was only a matter of time – “

  “And karma.”

  “Yes, and karma – before something bounced back to him. The Burning Bed syndrome...”

  I was referring to the case of Michigan housewife Francine Hughes, who after suffering domestic violence (then called “wife beating”) for 13 years, one night in 1977 set her bed on fire while her husband slept in it. She had loaded her kids into the car and re-entered their house to douse the bedroom with gasoline and light a match. The job complete, she drove directly to the police station to turn herself in.

  The resulting trial became a watershed for women’s rights. English and American common law regarded a wife as the property of her husband. Subsequent law codified the husband’s right to “chastise” his wife, excluding the police from meddling in “domestic squabbles.” Even when “chastisement” became illegal, society (and its enforcers, the police) considered it a man’s right to beat his wife in the privacy of his home, his castle. Otherwise the authority of the man in the hierarchy might be challenged, since the family structure was the cornerstone of society. In courts, inquiry ran along the lines of what the woman must have done to “provoke” his anger, meaning that she deserved physical abuse for her “disobedience.”

  The lawyer for Francine Hughes realized that the self-defense strategy would play into the prevailing view that she was an uppity woman who had simply been put into her place by her husband, and that she had rebelled against the institution of marriage by killing him. After all, he was asleep and therefore not threatening her at the moment she premeditatedly set him on fire. Instead, the lawyer argued “temporary insanity.” This was risky, since women who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity usually ended up institutionalized. Once the court proved her crazy, then she obviously needed to be locked up.

  What happened in the trial of Francine Hughes was that a jury of her peers acquitted her of murder, and she went free. This introduced the “battered woman defense” that took into account that years of psychological or physical abuse could lead to “temporary insanity” (and violent self-defense) on the part of the woman.

  In 1980, the year that Molly met Daniel, Faith McNulty published the book, The Burning Bed, about Francine Hughes’ crime and trial. When it was made, four years later, into a TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett, widespread attention was focused on domestic violence, resulting in changes throughout American society, from police stations to courtrooms, and more importantly in bedrooms.

  “Burning Bed or not, do you think the Thai courts will consider it self-defense? Maybe they’ll just see her as ‘Da Moll,’ the gangster partner of a swindler,” James said.

  “Molly’s not a gangster!” I defended her.

  “No... but they say she was his ‘most devoted disciple.’ She must have been in on his schemes. We know she could lie – she lied to us!” James commented. “Anyway, it’s all going to come down to the gun. Who brought the gun to that meeting?”

  I thought about it. The very premise of The Burning Bed was premeditated reaction to years of abuse. Now it all made sense: Molly’s loyalty to the man who deceived, degraded, and manipulated her, her low self-esteem, her recurring depressions, and her fleeing when she felt trapped. A great sadness swelled in my heart for our friend. This was the third time we were losing Mysterious Molly – and maybe this time for good.

  “I hope that Daniel brought the gun,” I said. “They scuffled and she got ahold of it and shot him in the heart. Only one shot – and he ended up dead.”

  “But maybe Molly brought the gun,” James countered. “It would be a kind of triumph for her, wouldn’t it? A dramatic declaration of her independence from the man who abused her all those years...”

  “And was the father of her children. Yow!” I added.

  We both fell silent. Turning to my desk, I furrowed my brow as I scrolled down the computer screen. “It says here that the penalty for murder in Thailand is 20 years in prison... or death by firing squad.”

  I stared at the screen for a long while. When I looked up, James’ eyes were glazed with shock. Without speaking, we walked outside and sat together holding hands on the porch, contemplating the age-old War Between the Sexes, and this personal connection to one of its battles. The muffled thumping of distant thunder rolled across the mesa, like drumbeats of a war that might never end.

  THE COTERIE

  The Tantra may be regarded as the religious experience most appropriate to the present condition of man – to life in the kali yuga, the age of darkness... Humanity is fallen: it is now a case of swimming against the stream... The Tantrika does not renounce the world; he tries to overcome it while enjoying perfect freedom.

  ~ Mircea Eliade

  Our life in northern New Mexico was graced by many rich friendships, and there was one group of friends with whom we forged quite intimate bonds. We called ourselves the Coterie. And Tantrically enough, we were five.

  When we met Nicholas at the Adobe Bar, we liked him right away. Working as an organic farmer had sculpted and tanned his body and platinum-tipped his blond hair, which he kept tied back in a ponytail. Over drinks we would rant about the plight of the planet, me from an environmentalist perspective and him from a sustainability perspective; in other words, we said a lot of “You’re absolutely right!” “And not only that...,” and “If we would only apply those community principles globally...” and so on in a relationship of mutual cheerleading. Nicholas understood community organizing, and during the fallow time of year, worked on advancing Taos on many green fronts.

  Once I got the Trance Liberation dances underway, I discovered a whole different side of him. The muscular farmer so at home with a hoe let out his inner Mikhail Baryshnikov in the magical ambiance of the trance dance, and I marveled at the delicate movements he was capable of. It was when we shared
dances that I noticed the spark between us, how we could glide across the floor eye-to-eye, in sync with each other. James, Nicholas, and I often got together for dinners, and eventually began cuddling with one another. Realizing where our love for one another was leading us, we discussed the possibility of becoming lovers. Once we established the ground rules (HIV tests, discretion, communication), our relationship widened. Maybe it was our ages – Nick in his 40’s and James and me in our 50’s – that gave us all the time in the world to explore each other without timetables nor goals.

  Just as we were embarking upon a sensual relationship with Nicholas, a new woman showed up at the dance: Cleo. Her intelligence seemed to course through her lean body to emerge out of the curls of her short, auburn hair the color of cinnamon; she was like an inverted exclamation mark. Her green eyes were stunning in their innocence, but her full lips curled and twitched slightly even when she was silent, as if they were speaking a secret naughty language. Cleo and I immediately recognized each other as soul sisters, and I noted she got Nick’s attention, too. Because of her strong physique, it was hard to tell her age (mid-50’s), which must have been due to her fanatical attention to diet, exercise, and anything in the mind-body-spirit genre. Her scrutiny of detail made her a massage therapist that gave an overall health consultation also, whether you asked for it or not!

  Her man Santo was from Italy, so he had a genetic proclivity for selecting the best wines and knowing the moment a sauce reached its peak. According to Santo, without garlic, life was not worth living. Tall, dark, and handsome: that was Santo. In counterpoint to his dark brown hair, his hazel eyes harbored little sparkles. A computer wizard, he worked consulting on computer systems for companies, a job which took him traveling as well as allowing him to work from home. Despite his sit-down job – or perhaps because of it – he doggedly pursued the ski runs in the winter, mountain trails and rock faces in the summer, and yoga classes with a passion. With his five o’clock shadow and tan skin, he usually looked like he had just gotten back from a camping trip. Together Cleo and Santo shared an artistic adobe and viga (wooden beamed) house in the foothills above Taos. “We totally adore your work!” Cleo exclaimed when they discovered Venus and Her Lover, and before long, she was dropping hints about intimate encounters.