We fucked like second nature, on the brink of terrified. We fucked like people in love.
Then I opened my eyes. His body was there like an amazing free gift. I was surprised to see it was still night.
“Chrysalis Moffat, Chrysalis Moffat,” Ralph muttered, looking at me with a dumbfounded nothing.
Then he said: “Do you love me?”
I was disproportionately shocked. I said, “Oh – yes. Really. I mean, of course.”
He said, stiff with embarrassment, “That’s good.”
I had to look away. It occurred to me that Ralph might be vulnerable. Like anyone else, he longed for reassurance. His ego was fragile: he was scared.
Yet I felt this was cowardly sophistry, an extrapolation from what I would feel. This once, I should accept I didn’t understand.
Ralph said, “Come here,” we made love again, the trance resumed. Caressing and sighing, we fell into pampered heightened sleep. Once in the night I woke up and we were fucking again. Already I felt a strange, magnified health.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
1What Ralph and Eddie had in common was a woman named Denise.
1.1To Ralph, she was a sister:
•elder
•step
•long-lost
1.2To Eddie, she was the only woman he ever loved.
1.3Thereby the two men were tied
– as if cuffed together for the duration of some action-packed adventure comedy, in which they overcome their differences to grow as people.
2In my home, they opened the “Tibetan School of Miracles.”
3I did the books.
3.1I did the marketing.
3.2I did the admin.
3.3I did the rest, the donkey work nobody else would do.
3.4On this diet, I became a new, formidable person.
•I spoke right up.
•The waiter knew me.
•I had good skin.
4Ralph took to deceit like a duck to water.
4.1Deceit spawned manipulation; manipulation bred threats; an atmosphere of fear and back-stabbing was the banal result.
4.2His subjects claimed to be enlightened, and even cured of physical and mental ills by these means:
•Sheila Matthews’s thyroid cancer went into remission.
•Jasper found a gallery to represent him.
• Arthur Clough’s piles shrank; Jo “Moose” Minty got a boyfriend; Anna Rossi’s internet laundry company sold for two million; Kate Higgins lost weight.
4.3The failures had themselves to blame.
5From Eddie’s point of view it was a gross misunderstanding: he never meant it any more than his prior scheme to build a rival Sea World next to Sea World, undercutting Sea World’s prices by 1%.
5.1When it came true, he went back into his shell. With a bottle, with pills, with a hooker to snivel to, Eddie lay low.
5.2The School succeeded over his dead body, until
6some months into the enterprise, Ralph cracked up.
6.1He stopped eating, washing, talking. Approached by well-wishers, he trembled like a maladapted dog.
6.2He sat by the pool in red tiger-striped swimming trunks all day long, stoned out of his mind.
7“Words to live by aren’t true,” Rita Perkins used to say.
7.1The guests raged, robbed of their pitiable misconception.
7.2Meanwhile, Eddie flew away away without goodbyes.
7.3Denise had written a brisk note, inviting him to play blackjack.
“I Am Not Getting to the Point If I Can’t Take You With Me / Sentimental Drivel: As Good As It Gets?”
I woke in Ralph’s arms. Up above, he was huffing in my hair, it was damp and warm. When he saw me wake, he held still, did his stillness thing, was like a big oak holding still to let the children climb.
“Good morning,” he said, “Chrysalis Moffat.”
“Oh, yes. This is really wonderful.”
I shifted to touch his chest, finding his heartbeat. It was unequivocal and bass: he definitely was alive. Of course this was not a real concern. Aloud and more materially, I worried:
“Is sex a sin? I mean, to your sort of Buddhist?”
Ralph said, “Yes, we’re going to hell.”
“Okay, then: if you don’t want to tell me.” I peered up at him. To my gratified disquiet, his expression was doting. His pulse quickened under my palm.
He said, “You can see right through me, can’t you?”
“Yes,” I lied. “It’s very handy.”
Finally he took the first shower: I went down to make us coffee, putting on Ralph’s white shirt. It was already 8:15:
The Real World
at 9, I had the new accountant, Snake Johnson, coming to explain the tax-free religious status forms.
Nonetheless I scampered on the stairs, euphoric. I imagined leaping free of the steps to land, dead. Shot down by a duck hunter, at my life’s dizzy apex! Oh, I didn’t care what I looked like or anything! If Snake could tell and despised me, and called me “Ma’am,” sarcastically (he was from Oklahoma, and said “Shoot!” and “Freaking –”: I had reason to suppose Jesus Christ might be his personal savior)
I didn’t care! I didn’t care, today I didn’t care!
I did the little jink outside to come back in the kitchen, round the lurid purple ornamental cabbage which was my size, if I were balled up qua cabbage, and usually the vegetable intimidated me, but not today – today, I dared and was invincible; plunged in the door
walking smack into a chair. My leg sang with a bone feeling.
Eddie was sitting in the other chair at the table, adding Kahlua to a bowl of Cream of Wheat. A stitch poked coquettishly over his fat lip, looking like the leg of a beetle he was taking his time in eating.
“You look like shit,” he said. “Is Michaelson gone?”
The Kitchen Scene
“You brought the chairs back,” I said, sitting cautiously. I crossed my arms over the incriminating shirt.
Eddie snorted. “No way – Ralph the Furniture Fascist must of. Despite I drilled him, they’re Oscar Person chairs, that sleazeball designer who had Mom in, like, Svengali obedience, she’d buy his fucking toe clippings?”
I sighed in a discouraging way, but Eddie nonetheless:
“The eggplant-shape dude with the sneaky unsounded farting? Maybe you didn’t smell, I smelled. So total moral objection to the fart chairs . . .” His animation failed and he looked at me with the exhausted need of a man who’s been awake all night in the waiting room of a busy Casualty unit with a hundred sick, short-fused Hispanics and their children. “So? Did you, like, just say he was gone and I’m too fucked up?”
I looked at him with a feigned query. Then I “realized.”
“Oh! You want to know –”
“Yeah, you’re kind of not telling me the psychopath’s gone?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I went to tell him . . . to leave.”
Eddie’s nostrils flared. He saw the shirt and saw the shirt again and it was awful for him:
“NO. NO. Tell me you didn’t fuck him.”
“Of course I didn’t!” I said automatically, scandalized.
And Ralph walked in; immaculate, white-clad, bearing a tranquil, shampoo aura. He came straight to me, bent and kissed me on the head. Digging through my hair, he tickled my nape. I felt my mouth tug inexorably into a simper.
Then Ralph straightened up and said to Eddie, equably:
“I’m sorry I punched you. I lost my temper.”
There was a pause. The sun beamed imbecilically in the windows. Somewhere out of sight, a radio played “The Girl from Ipanema.” The pause became extended; paralyzing; hypnoidal. Implicit in it, and in Ralph’s cool stance, was:
If Eddie threw Ralph out now, I would leave with Ralph.
“Whatever.” Eddie broke the spell: “Male bonding, right?”
“I thought it might not matter.” Ralph smiled magnanimously.
Then he turned his back to both o
f us and stretched – arms spread luxuriously, back arched, stomach out, in an attitude of perfected satisfaction. Eddie stared at me with the sick glazed eyes of a man who has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Then while Ralph went to the cupboard, found a new bricklike pack of espresso and snipped it gaspingly open with the appropriate kitchen scissors, all his movements economical and right,
Eddie and I fell into Pause Two, a disconsolation. A cloud thematically drifted across the sun. My heart crumbled and I thought, Oh, of course it’s no big deal. I’ve just betrayed my only trust, is all. And then, as if it logically followed: Now I get to kill myself, no one can fault me. I won’t right this minute, but the coast is definitely clear, ethically, were I to. However, then I’d miss all the sex. (I looked sneakily at Ralph, and felt pacified. There was no pressing need to act.)
I remembered inopportunely that Deleuze, of the poststructuralist double act Deleuze and Guattari, had killed himself, like Guy Saint-Lazare. Or was it Guattari? Because of their book A Thousand Plateaus, I imagined them leaping suicidally from buttes. I looked from Eddie to Ralph, feeling that one was like Deleuze and the other like Guatarri, and it was therefore crucial to know which died –
“Coffee?” said Ralph, personable and apt.
Loose Ending: Irrelevant
The Oscar Person kitchen chairs, 5,000 dollars apiece, were monstrous cast-iron toadstools, backed with spikes long and splayed enough to skewer a head each, their seats each bearing three large butt-imprinting holes revealing hollow innards hinting at foul contents; in sober fact, food inevitably straying into said holes until the chair stank and must be upended, and its guts scrubbed, by a strong man, whose arm would lodge in a hole, requiring the attendance of the fire brigade.
Upshot
The School began – as if we’d always meant it to happen.
“You Can’t Go Home Again If You Have Never Been There Before”
“Tibetan School of Miracles,” August–Dec ’98
For some months we had no live-in pupils. Then it was light work. On Sundays Ralph gave lectures: Tuesday night was meditation class.
The time would approach, making us crabby. Ralph put on those clothes. Eddie hovered, advising:
“You give them echinacea food, only with addictive drugs. That’s the only way this thing is going to work.”
“No, I’ll bribe some small-time Rinpoche off the internet, cause the white-guy thing is going to sink us, promise.”
“Yeah, it’s doing okay now cause up to now you did my whole ideas.”
Jasper always came early, offering to help. He would smile and try to catch Ralph’s eye, red-faced. I always left setting up the tea and chairs to the last minute so that he’d look needed.
People came and we must greet them in delight. Lynn, Eddie’s ex, got 40 bucks a pop for just greeting. Finally I learned how from watching her, although I always felt ashamed if anyone could see me.
Ralph hid until a pivotal moment, then came out with ponderous grace, like a float. He spoke very slowly, and when he made a point, the audience inhaled sharply. His face preserved a hawkish exaltation, even afterward, when he just shook hands.
Ralph left and the people left, freed. Eddie and I stood watching the taillights diminish, outside in the dark, as if hand in hand. Remember ran out barking at the last minute.
“Well, that’s over.”
Ralph came down again in gym shorts. We drove to the video store, to Taco Bell, we were belligerently average.
On those nights, Ralph was never interested in sex.
August
In that initial period, we were a threesome, a gang.
1We had long conversations about the way the School would change people’s lives for the better and become a nationwide force. We sat up late in the kitchen drinking highballs and having these conversations. It was like being fifteen.
2“But you believe in God, right, Michaelson? Cause you saw God, which is a dead giveaway. And Chrysalis is just the kind of person who would, cause. But what about me? Where do I fit in?”
3We listened to the Easy Rider soundtrack over and over. When “Born to Be Wild” came on in a store once, I felt I belonged, I smiled at the grocer. Then I thought, “When this is over, I’ll never be able to listen to the Easy Rider soundtrack again,” and had to leave the store, chilled, without my spaghetti squash.
4Ralph toyed with my long hair, loving me. I loved Ralph back, I took a few pills and loved Eddie. We lay full-length in the summer grass, out of our minds:
5Ralph and I were on our waking-up walk, round the private wood. The birds chirped boldly, thinking they were alone. The air felt alive, its early clarity a throbbing presence like a bass note.
And I confided: “I woke up not in agony today.” I just said it with no qualification, as it came, made cocky by possession of good news. I said it and listened joyously: it really was the case.
Ralph said, “Why were you, ever, in agony?”
Finally I asked him what he meant. I was out of breath then, though I shouldn’t have been.
And he said he could not think of anyone who deserved agony less than me.
We went on a while in silence, then he put out his hand. He waved it in front of me; I looked at him questioning; he had to say, “Go on,” before I took it. We walked and walked. The trees shook and the bushes tugged at our legs like lonely children. When we skirted a clearing, the low sun flying sideways in strobes between the trees made our shadows blink on and off. I felt muscles in my legs, as if I was strong.
Ralph said, “Have you noticed your hair and my hair are so alike?”
(6 Different times are different.
Ralph and I became inseparable.
Our relations were beautiful, like a foal we held in common.
No one would be careless with the delicate foal.
We walked down halls and they became true halls.
Rooms we stood in, shone.
Then it was over.)
September
We added a day of exercises on Saturday: that brought in 400 dollars a week. Though it started as a joke, Ralph’s tape, Buddha Management, was picked up by a catalog and sold 140 copies. Vegan restaurants, aromatherapists, “green” butchers, bought advertising space in our brochure. The first, for-real, fat-ass donations came in.
Eddie spent it all and more. He bought a motorbike he couldn’t ride, he bought a bear skin. He bought cocaine, lap-dances, drinks for the house. He flew to Hawaii but returned the same night, complaining that it was “all muggy and fat chicks.”
He bought a leather sofa, then didn’t like it when it came: it was left in the yard, where it mildewed and sank to its knees. Then he failed to set it on fire, even some.
When I confronted him, he barked, “Yeah, I’m trying to have a good time. I don’t know what you expect –”
What you expect
and looked daggers.
We were in the Land of the Lost, alone, I can’t remember why. The morning sun was too bright: it made the gravel colorful, like aquarium pebbles. Eddie put his hands on his hips, pissed. I spluttered, “No, I’m worried about you. It’s real cry-for-help stuff, what you’re doing, it’s scary.”
Eddie made the cool, mock-surprised face of Humphrey Bogart not falling for the bad guy’s ploy. “Spending lots of money is killing me, not.”
“But I never –”
“Not.”
“No, I genuinely –”
“Not.”
We stared at each other for an improbable length of time without speaking. The smug tension in Eddie’s face relaxed. Then we were just looking.
He looked older.
“Well,” he said finally, “got to go cry for help.”
“Yeah,” I said equally finally, “Have fun.”
October
The first residential weekend was sold out: thirty people came to stay in the house. When Jasper arrived with his suitcase, three hours early, it was like a pajama party. He tri
ed on my new boots, we made a Bundt cake together with the wrong ingredients. But then the others came too:
Meditation: on faith
The gravel has been raked, the chairs removed, the glass is blue with clean. It’s sunset, and the Land of the Lost is dim under the massed sky. Everyone is whispering and expectant but me
(because I fret about the practicality of evening lectures. It’s all very well the lighting rental’s more than covered by the takings, but should something break. Heating this is bad enough but if we have to light it –)
Ralph walks in. I stand up automatically, handing him his notes. And for the first time, everyone stands up behind me. The cross-legged people twist to see, then anxiously, hurriedly, scramble to their feet. They stand extra-straight, to compensate for their tardiness.
Ralph stops in his tracks, deadpan. He surveys us and then looks at the glass stars overhead. As he raises his hand, the rain begins.
For a long held breath, no one moves, allowing for the washing sound and the changed air. Then Ralph makes a pressing-down gesture, and we sit.
Throughout the talk, there is a special restlessness in the audience. Something has been achieved.
Afterward, I overhear Matthias, the civil engineer who travels all the way from Sacramento:
“. . . and everyone stood at the same time, that’s what blows my mind. I mean, we knew.”
“Of course,” says Kate Higgins. “I just felt it. Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” says earnest Matthias. “I don’t know what happened. I just found myself on my feet.”
Kate nods, “That’s it. And that’s why it happened.”
“You mean the rain?” Matthias says, balking.
“Well, of course! Rain-making has been happening for thousands of years. Just look at the Apache – or that story in Brazil, did you read about that? It was in the New York Times.”
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 16
