by John Haskell
“Are you staying in Lexington?” I say, and the man, whose name is Geoff, says that they’re driving on. To Colorado. “Where in Colorado?” I ask, and he tells me they have some friends outside of Boulder. “Really?” I say. “That’s where I’m going.”
“Maybe we’ll see you,” he says, and they all nod, and I tell them sure, maybe so.
And then I let them go. In my mind I let go of the idea that the maroon car is my car, and that these people are somehow my enemies. There’s a difference between wanting what they have and wanting them not to have it, and I say good night.
I go back to my room. I lie on my bed, my feet crossed, looking up at the plaster of the ceiling. I stare at the cracks in the plaster, seeing the branching lines become like hieroglyphs, and as my eyes defocus, the picture formed by the lines becomes more and more abstract, and after a while the lines are gone and even the ceiling is gone, and I see, in my mind, the gas station in New Jersey.
I see Anne, pulling up in Chaucer, bending forward, looking at me from the driver’s seat. I’m coming out of the convenience store. She’s sitting in the car, her hands on the steering wheel, and then suddenly there’s a blur in my peripheral vision. A dark car, the sound of brakes, and the car driving by. I remember cursing the driver for coming so close, for possibly hitting my car. I remember checking the side of the car, thinking they might have scraped it as they passed. I remember Anne’s face, looking up at me through the window.
In the morning, as is my habit, I part the curtains to check on the two parked cars in the parking lot. Both the cars are gone.
I make coffee at a miniature coffeemaker in the room, and then I get dressed. I set my room key on the television, go to my own little car, and as I leave the circular road and drive to the highway entrance I run into a traffic jam. I get out, walk past the idling cars in the street, and there, at the front of the line of cars, is a procession, a procession of children dressed in sparkling costumes, some as animals, some as gods or goddesses. A portable music device is playing dance music, and the children have learned the steps and they’re dancing to the music. Parents are walking alongside, watching, and more than just parents, the whole community is participating in the event. Even I, standing by a stall with a woman selling Mexican food, am part of it. I buy a taco from the woman, and when the dance is over I get back in my car. Everyone else is driving away, going where they have to be going, and so that’s what I do.
IV
(Luxuria)
1.
Human beings have a barrier, a membrane that separates our everyday life from our sexual life. I call it the sexual membrane. It’s a protective device, enabling us to function in a day-to-day way during the day, but also, by lifting it up or pulling it aside, a sexual, passionate part of ourselves is also available. Anne had such a thin membrane it was sometimes hard to tell what side she was on. Not that she was always thinking about sex, or engaging in sexual activity, but that to go from the everyday side to the sexual side took very little effort. Which is the beauty of the membrane: this permeability. It’s possible to go back and forth as many times as you want. And although it’s designed to allow for easy crossing, from one side to the other, sometimes, when you’re on one side of the membrane, you tend to forget that the other side exists.
And it’s not just sexual.
Driving through the river valleys and rolling hills of the midsection of America, through St. Louis and Kansas City and Topeka, I rarely stopped to eat. I was stopping for gas because the car needed gas, but food and eating had become ideas only, and I was losing interest in them. Driving along with my arm out the window I was unworried about sunburn, uninterested in the scenery or the historical markers. I was just driving, determined to keep Anne uppermost in my thoughts. And she was. My mind flitted from thought to thought and she was there all right, but the thoughts I had did not engender the feeling I wanted. My thoughts were connected to loss and sadness and I was looking for more positive and motivating emotions. Loss and sadness had their place, but their tendency was to pull me into myself, and I wanted to pull myself out, into the world. And the problem, I thought, was desire. If I would have a little more desire then my thoughts—and by virtue of my thoughts, my life—would automatically focus on the world and enter the world and pull me away from my suffering.
Elaborate systems of enlightenment are built around the idea of desirelessness, but with me it seemed to bring, instead of enlightenment, only confusion and directionlessness. And I didn’t like that. For me, feeling desire was synonymous with feeling alive, which is why I was looking out across the vast passing country for a place to pull off the road.
The color of this particular part of the earth was chalky and red. Scattered plants were turning green on the skin of the landscape, and my eyes were scanning the landscape, looking for a certain kind of spot, not sure what the spot would look like, but certain I’d know it when I saw it.
And when I did see it, I pulled off the highway. I was about a half hour outside of Salina, Kansas, and I parked the car in a small gravel area at the side of a county road. I walked through some weeds and crossed over a sagging barbed-wire fence into a sandy opening in the trees near a streambed, with rocks and roots and water flowing past. I settled myself in the sand of this area, and under the sun, fortressed by rocks and brush, that’s where I pulled down my pants and began to try to masturbate. I say try because I wasn’t feeling especially sexy or sexual or turned-on. I just wanted to feel what those things felt like.
Something in me was definitely willing, at least to try, to bring into my mind some fantasy, or a series of fantasies, and they came and went but something else in me was either not willing or just not interested. I was distracted by something, or worried about something, and although I tried, I was disconnected from a part of myself, from Anne and the memory of Anne. I was disconnected from my body, and the excitement that resided in my body. But as I say, I tried to make it happen, to make desire happen, and I got to a certain point and I decided … I didn’t decide. I changed my mind. The moment wasn’t right, or the surroundings weren’t right. I walked back to the car, got in, drove back to the main road, and continued on my westward trail.
Desirelessness can be a good thing, no doubt about it, but for me desirelessness was not the cessation of desire, it was the loneliness of no desire. Losing Anne was, in my imagination, the same as losing everything. And although I still believed I would find Anne, and still desired to find her, the membrane between me and my desire, I could feel, was thickening. I wanted to puncture the membrane or open the membrane, and to do that, even in my mind, I had to make an effort. And this effort involved focusing on Anne. Which was easy enough, except my thoughts alone weren’t getting me through the membrane. The memories came but not the breaking through.
I remembered the time I bought Anne a negligee. She didn’t want a negligee but she put it on and stood as she supposed I wanted her to stand, and it wasn’t the sexiness of the garment that aroused me; it was her willingness to wear it. Her willingness was what I remembered, and it’s what I was thinking about when, after driving along without music or human interaction, I stopped somewhere on the plains of Kansas and got some gas. A short distance down the road leading back to the interstate, at the edge of the gas station, two people, a man and a woman, were sitting with a few bags. I slowed down as I approached, pulling to a stop in front of them.
2.
They said they were coming from a festival, and from the way they were dressed—he with the long hair, she with a feather in her braided hair—you might have guessed the Woodstock festival, or a Woodstock reunion. They were polite and appreciative, and as they put their canvas bags in the back seat they said they were going to Boulder, Colorado, which was where I was going.
The man, whose name was Fletcher, did most of the talking. The girl, whose name, appropriately, was Feather, sat in the middle of the back seat. She had lips like the lips of Brigitte Bardot, and I could see, in the r
earview mirror, that her light brown hair was cut very short in front, so that it stood up, as in photos I’d seen of Chief Joseph, the last great chieftain of the Nez Perce Indians. Although Feather didn’t talk much, her wide eyes were full of enthusiasm. Life for her was all about learning and growing, and since I’d been overlooking those aspects of life, I found her innocence and honesty attractive. Fletcher was also attractive and honest, and I was glad to have them in the car.
During the getting-to-know-you stage I asked them questions about themselves and it didn’t take much to get them talking about their theory of love, which was really a theory of desire, according to which, love was just an echo of desire. “There’s only desire,” Fletcher said, and that’s what they were after, a state of continual desire in which love would flourish. It wasn’t pleasure exactly, but like pleasure, it existed for itself. To have desire—and specifically desire untethered to an object—“You have to get through all the other stuff, society’s stuff.” You had to get past the craving for outcome.
Although I challenged them occasionally, mostly I was interested in how they actually practiced what they were preaching. Because I was thinking about Anne, the idea of desire unconnected to an object made no sense to me, at least at the moment. But I was willing to listen. And they were willing to explain to me, and even show me, what they meant. At one point Feather actually pulled down her drawstring pants, enough to show me the tattoo of two arrows intertwining on her abdomen.
The back seat was small, especially with their luggage, but at some point Fletcher climbed in the back with Feather and I could see in the rearview mirror that they seemed to be in love. They would have called it something else, but whatever it was, they stayed there in the back seat, nestled in their canvas packs. I would occasionally look back at them and occasionally my eyes met Feather’s, and although she didn’t look like Anne, her eyes reminded me of Anne. They seemed to be saying, “Remember this? Remember desire, existing without cause or reason?” They seemed to be trying to show me how thin the veil was between the desire side and the other side, not talking, but in a way urging me to break through to that side, giving me a pretty clear invitation to cross the boundary to what I wanted to imagine, and the only problem was, I was driving the car. Instead of watching them I turned my attention to the fence posts that were racing past the highway.
We drove across the flat expanse of prairie, watching the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains coming into view. As we drove through Denver and up to the town of Boulder, I told them a version of my story, and they seemed optimistic about the probability of finding my wife. If desire, physical desire, was in me, and if I could access it, they practically guaranteed I would do what needed to be done. Both of them, they said, could see a little bit into the future. Fletcher said, “You can tap into the other world,” and they both nodded as if they were acquainted with that other world.
When we pulled into Boulder I found a pay phone and called the number Linda had written on the piece of paper. The British fellow answered, and he gave me directions to a house in the foothills outside of Boulder. My two companions didn’t seem to have a place to stay so I invited them to come with me. They accepted the invitation and we drove up several roads to a mailbox in front of a driveway. A man with dreadlocks pointed out where we could pitch a tent—they had a tent—and when we found a nice flat spot on the pine needles, that’s what we did.
Other people were camping on the property around this house but they were barely visible through the trees. We laid our sleeping bags in the tent, which was probably a two-person tent, but they didn’t mind and I didn’t either. Not only did I have my sleeping bag, now I had—it wasn’t a teepee but I thought of it as a teepee—the sense of being an Indian. Light came in from the top of the tent, and also from the walls, which were made of thin green nylon. Since there was going to be a gathering that evening Feather and Fletcher decided to walk up to the center of where that gathering would be. I lay back on my unfurled sleeping bag, watching the sky pass by over my head and listening to the generalized hum of voices preparing for the party.
* * *
It wasn’t the first time we met, but close to the first time. I had gone to Morgan’s house. She lived in the back of her store, and the store was closed but as usual there were some people there, men and women, and one of the women was you. A bottle of bourbon was being passed around and there were bottles of beer. Everyone was guzzling and I remembered sitting around a fire. There couldn’t have been a fire, not in the middle of a downtown store, but there was some focal point and, at least gesturally, people were warming their hands around whatever it was. And then the people began to leave. After a while it was just two couples, Morgan and her friend, plus you and your new friend—which was me—and we moved to the bedroom, which was just a bed against the wall in the back of the store. One thing led to something else and kissing was involved. We were showing each other, first our legs and then our buttocks, and you were eager to show your butt. You wanted to have a butt contest where we’d all show our butts. In a contest of butts you were sure you could win. Morgan’s friend was getting excited and I was getting moderately excited, and then the something else led to hands on bodies and pressure on bodies and although mostly our clothes stayed on, desire was established. And enough of it so that the pull of desire brought us together, brought me across that gulf or membrane, and together the chain of events led us to live with each other, to fall in love and live whatever that love, and the pleasure of that love, would be.
3.
I found Linda and her two friends, Geoff and Lisa, sitting on a picnic bench in front of a large canvas yurt. Linda stood up when she saw me approaching and met me on the dirt road leading to the yurt. I could tell that something was going on, that a familial powwow was in progress, and that this probably wasn’t a very good time to talk.
But I wanted to talk. “I was looking for you,” I said.
“I’m glad you made it,” she said.
“This is nice,” I said, turning and looking generally around the area.
We stood there, and I have to say it was slightly awkward. She looked at me and she seemed glad to see me, but the conversation didn’t seem to go anywhere.
“How was the drive?” I said.
“It was fine,” she said.
She smiled at me in an apologetic way, and I could tell she felt impelled to get back to her friends, so I told her I’d see her later, at the party.
“Definitely,” she said, and we both turned and walked away.
By the time I got back to the house the celebration had already started. People on the porch were playing guitars and singing, and there was a punch bowl and people were drinking and dancing, swaying and twirling to the music. I drank from the bowl and I was introduced—or introduced myself—to a number of people, all from the same social tribe, all wearing loose-fitting garments and carefully uncared-for hair. Smiling, and not just outwardly, these friends—the community of people that lived in and around the tents and the house—were living a kind of cliché, but as I stood with them, in the middle of it, they didn’t seem at all false or pretentious.
Someone had built a sweat lodge just down a trail from the house, and people would leave the area around the house and then return later, hair wet and faces flushed. I joined a group—one man had a flashlight—walking down to this sweat lodge and what it was was a stick structure like an igloo, covered in plastic, with a fire outside. Red-hot rocks were brought from the fire into the tent and doused with water. About six or eight people were sitting cross-legged in the sweat lodge, all naked and sweating, and when I saw Feather standing at the entrance, steam rising off her body, her hair braided like the famous Indian chief she was emulating, I didn’t fall in love because I was still thinking about Anne. But I saw her beauty. Even from a sidelong view her nakedness revealed a beauty of purity, or a purity of beauty, and yes, Anne had purity, and she also had a sense of humor, but while Anne was uppermost in my m
ind, I was somewhere else, not in the upper regions, but somewhere below that, in my belly, which was feeling unusually taut as I took off my shirt and my shoes. When I was completely undressed and about to step into the tent, expecting to see Feather either fully or partially dressed, there she was, still naked, still standing outside the igloo entrance, still dripping from the steam. She was standing in front of me with her cowlick hair, and I was just bringing my eyes down from her hair to her face when she kissed me. She sort of jumped up quickly, and kissed me on the lips, and then she walked away.
What that kiss had meant was something I tried to figure out, turning it around in my mind. And when I took my turn in the steam tent, sat in the circle, watching the rocks glowing in the center of the circle, and when I thought of the person who’d kissed me, when I pictured her, it was Anne. As the heat radiated off the rocks, the images that came into my mind were images of Anne. One image especially, of her, innocently standing on the rocks at a tide pool, letting herself get splashed by a wave, and her thin yellow shirt getting wet and transparent, and then her turning to me.
After the sweat lodge I went back to the main celebration, stood with my cup of punch, a little away from the main group physically, yet feeling oddly connected to the general hubbub.
And not just to the people.
I wandered down a pine needle path away from the house, wandering along until I came to a tree. Slowly, I approached the tree, stood close enough to smell the tree, and listen, and look at the tree, not as a thing but as another life. I began to feel a tenderness for the tree. The old gnarled bark seemed beautiful to me, expanding and contracting in front of me, and the life of the tree (the force that through the green fuse moved) seemed visible to me, and when I touched the tree, put my hand against the hard bark, I could feel the yearning and sadness of the tree.
