by Anne Cushman
He laughed again. “No. I’m just trying to upgrade my image.”
By the time Tom and I slept together—almost three weeks later—I knew that he was eight years older than me and worked for a software firm in San Jose, designing corporate-training modules with titles like Work Experience: How to Act So People Think You Have It and making more money in three months than I made in a couple of years.
He knew that I used to date a photographer, but that that was definitely over.
Lori was supportive but baffled; her desire for me to have a committed relationship—with someone who wasn’t Matt—collided with her earth mother distrust of anyone who worked in any industry more high tech than garden supplies.
“Amanda, what are you doing with this guy?” she asked. “He’s not your type.”
“Meaning, he actually returns my phone calls?” I was rummaging through Lori’s closet, looking for something to wear to go out to dinner with him. I held up a dark-green cotton turtleneck. “Meaning he shows up on time for dinner, and gets up in the morning to go to work?”
“Meaning that this is a guy who spends his whole day designing products to help people convince other people to buy things they don’t need.” Lori was lying flat on her stomach on her bed, chin propped up in her elbows. “You can’t wear that, Amanda. It makes your skin look like split pea soup.” She got up and went to her closet. “Here, try this. I think he’s boring. But if you’re going out with him, I want him to think you’re the hottest thing in the galaxy.”
I held the shirt she had tossed me up to my chest—a sheer red silk blouse with a scooped neckline. “For your information, his latest client was a company that sells surgical supplies.” I frowned at my reflection. “I don’t know, Lori. I don’t want him to be thinking about my boobs the whole time we’re talking.”
“He’ll be thinking about them anyway. And for God’s sake, don’t even get me started on the medical-industrial complex.”
“Do we really have to debate the whole capitalist system? Give me a break, Lori. I thought you’d be pleased that I was with someone respectable.”
“I have a bad feeling about this, that’s all. I think you’re looking for a father figure.”
I was silent for a minute, holding the blouse to my chest. My father’s shoes in the back of the coat closet, caked with mud, bigger than any shoes I have ever seen. My mother had discarded every other trace of him. But for some reason, she had kept these, as if some part of her believed he might come back and step into them.
“This guy is nothing like my father,” I told her.
“My point exactly,” she said.
Within a month, I was spending almost every night with Tom. When I forgot my overnight bag one weekend, he suggested that I move in. I got a part-time job at Doggie Day Care in San Jose, grooming aristocratic salukis, playing fetch with retrievers whose owners were too busy to throw balls. In the afternoon, I’d come home to his condo and do yoga on a balcony just big enough for my mat, overlooking a small cement carp pond filled with golden fish. Sometimes, when he got home from work, I’d still be there, balanced upside down in a shoulder stand. He’d lean against the sliding glass doors and look at me. “My little yogini,” he’d say fondly, as if I were an exotic animal he’d brought home from the pet store.
Tom had a kitchen filled with white-and-steel appliances: a microwave, an espresso maker, a juicer, an ice cream maker, a pasta maker, a bread machine, a yogurt maker, a rice cooker with settings for sushi rice, brown rice, dry rice, wet rice. The manuals were all in a drawer right under the waffle iron, still in their sealed plastic sheaths. Propped open on his counter in a plastic cookbook holder was a pristine copy of The Tassajara Recipe Book, whose pages had been open for as long as I’d known him to a recipe for goat cheese zucchini pizza. I kept meaning to make it, but I never did. Instead, we went out to dinner almost every night: Thai, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian. Every Friday night we rented a video and made love afterward, finishing by 11:00 sharp, so as not to throw off our sleep schedules.
At first, the distance from Matt was a relief. It was a relief to be in a relationship with someone who would introduce me as his girlfriend, instead of arguing that the word itself was a demeaning simplification of life’s complex relationships; a relief to watch Tom walk out the door in the morning, and not think of him again until he’d walk in the door at night. I emailed Matt and told him I was in a serious relationship, but that I hoped we would always be friends. All he wrote back was a quote from Carlos Castaneda: “All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore pick a path with heart.”
Tom proposed to me after I’d been living with him for six months. He proposed over dinner in his favorite Japanese restaurant. The waiter presented the ring on a little cloisonné tray along with two glasses of warm sake and a pair of origami cranes. The ring flashed on my finger, a diamond surrounded by tiny rubies. Doing yoga the next morning, it dug into my hand as I did Downward Dog, a sharp reminder that the shape of my life was going to change forever.
Two days later, I got a manila envelope in the mail, covered with foreign stamps. Inside it, with no note, was a feather, a foot-long flame of crimson and turquoise and gold.
That afternoon, I got out the manual for the bread machine. I poured in the flour, the yeast, the salt. I stood and watched through the glass lid as the moving arms pummeled the dough. I hadn’t even gotten flour on my hands. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I saw the tears dropping on the granite counter.
I left the ring by the bread machine, with a note wrapped around it. I took the bus back to San Francisco and never came back. By some miracle, there was an opening in my old household; I moved back into my own room gratefully, like putting on a familiar suit of clothes. Two months later, I was in bed with Matt again.
“EARTH TO AMANDA,” said Lori now, as we pulled up to the curb in front of my house. She popped open the trunk to her car. “All I do is mention Matt’s name, and you’re gone for thirty-two blocks.”
“I was thinking about Tom, actually.”
“Well, that’s a little better, but not much. Have you told him you’re going?”
“He must have gotten the email I sent out. But I didn’t hear anything back.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not surprising. You’re his Matt. He’s probably got fifteen friends telling him, ‘Don’t write her back. Whatever you do, don’t write her back.’” She leaned over and gave me a hug. “Listen, I’ve got to run—I’m putting in a bonsai garden over near the Presidio. I’ll call you later and we’ll set up a time tomorrow for me to help you pack.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, getting out of the car and walking around to get my new backpack—bulging with supplies—out of the trunk. It was a ritualistic protest. We both knew she would never let me pack by myself.
As Lori’s car pulled away, I unlocked the front door and began to haul my purchases up the narrow stairs, hoping I wouldn’t run into either of my housemates. I’d been living with the same two people for almost two years, which was a kind of record for stability in my life. One of them was Ernie, a former Buddhist monk who now sold life insurance for Allstate. He was a stout, balding man in his mid forties who walked with a stiff-legged limp from the cartilage he tore in his left knee on a meditation retreat. At the age at which many successful businessmen are starting to look around at their accumulated wealth and ask, Is this all there is to life? Ernie was trying to make up for a youth squandered on spiritual practice by putting as much money as possible into his SEP-IRA.
Unfortunately, so far that didn’t appear to be a whole lot; monastic training had not done wonders for his salesmanship. “Remember that everything in life is impermanent,” I once overheard him saying to a potential client on the telephone. “Everything that is dear to you will dissolve eventually.” A few minutes later, he walked glumly into the kitchen, where I was making a smoothie. “Did you make the sale?” I asked. “They’re still thinking abo
ut it,” he’d said.
My other housemate was Ishtar, a goddess worshipper with a night job answering calls on a phone sex line. Her professional dream was to lead tantra workshops in which she could teach people to have multiple orgasms without ejaculating. The men, that is. The women actually were supposed to ejaculate, through some process involving the kundalini energy and the third finger of your left hand. Ishtar had explained it to me repeatedly. But I’d never been able to make it work, myself, and at this point just thinking about trying it made me irritated; just another item to add to the list of personal-growth techniques I was supposed to practice every morning, along with writing down my dreams, doing yoga, meditating, and doing my Bates eye improvement exercises. (If one of those had to go, would I rather be multiply orgasmic or have twenty-thirty vision without corrective lenses?)
I stopped in the kitchen to grab a cold beer from the refrigerator. I popped the top, took a long swig, and then headed for the hall. But at the door to the kitchen, Ernie met me, looking like a worried donkey. “Have you found a subletter yet?”
No, I haven’t even started looking. Give me a break. “Uh…I think I’m close. There’s a guy who seems really interested.” I took another slug of beer and felt the comforting buzz start to spread through my body. “He’s a handyman,” I improvised. “A Buddhist, like you. I met him at Whole Foods.”
“When do we get to meet him?”
“I’ll set up a meeting. Maybe tomorrow night.” That would give me time to find someone plausible. I could see myself cruising the aisles, looking for a Buddhist handyman. Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing your drill and mala beads; would you like to live in my house?
“Does he have the qualities we want in a roommate?”
“What qualities are those?”
“A couch,” said a voice from the stairs. Ishtar walked into the room, wearing a jangle of gold necklaces and a pair of harem pants that made her look like she just walked off the set of I Dream of Jeannie. “We want someone who has a couch.”
“I was speaking more of spiritual qualities,” said Ernie. “Stability, cooperativeness, willingness to communicate, that sort of thing.”
“I think it takes a lot of character to acquire furniture,” Ishtar said. “Plus a positive, empowered self-image. You really have to see yourself as an adult to go out and buy an actual couch.”
“He has a couch,” I said. “In fact I think he has a whole matched set of Pottery Barn furniture. Coffee table, couch, rug, drapes, the works. He seemed to really have it together.”
They both looked at me blankly, before Ernie asked the obvious: “Then why does he want to live with us?”
In my room, I dropped my packages on the floor, gulped the last of the beer, and flung myself on the unmade bed. Through the window, I could hear the screech of a recycling truck backing up across the street, followed by clanging metal. I was fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. I was preparing to go on a spiritual pilgrimage to India. Why was I in such a foul mood?
Hoping for inspiration, I reached for one of the books on my bedside table, and opened it at random. “Meditation is based on the premise that the natural state of the mind is calm and clear.” Yeah, right. “It provides a way to train our mind to settle into this state.”
The beer was starting to take effect; belching, I could feel myself floating off onto a cloud of spiritual inspiration. Meditation: there’s a fabulous idea! That will get me in the mood to go to India!
To be honest, I’d never had much luck with meditation. True, I always loved the three or four sweaty, endorphin-buzzed minutes of silent sitting at the end of yoga class, when all thoughts seemed to have been wrung out of my mind like dirty dishwater. When I first started practicing yoga, I had even created a little altar in the corner of my bedroom out of a shawl draped over a TV stand. I picked up a brass Buddha at a garage sale and stocked up on vanilla-scented candles and amber incense at the yoga studio store. I even went online to order a meditation cushion stuffed with buckwheat hulls.
But when it came right down to it, there always seemed to be more compelling things to do than sitting still staring at a candle. And in the chaos of getting ready for my India trip, I’d been tossing my dirty laundry in my meditation corner.
I heaved myself out of bed and began picking my socks off my altar. Damn, where were my matches? I spent five minutes looking for them, finally finding them by the bathtub next to Ishtar’s bong. I went back to my room and sat down cross-legged on my cushion. I lit the candle and the incense. I breathed in the sandalwood smoke, the sulfur of the match.
I felt virtuous. I imagined a serene smile on my face. Yes, this trip to India would transform my life. I studied my toes tucked up onto my thigh in half lotus. The other yoga teachers all had brilliantly colored toenails, but I kept forgetting to buy polish. But now my life was back on track. I would meditate thirty minutes every day. I would drink wheatgrass juice. I would bike to Walgreens and get some new nail polish, something red—not a tacky scarlet, a deep burgundy. I saw myself walking up to an ashram, my new backpack on my back, white-tipped Himalayan peaks all around me, my burgundy toenails peeking out of my sandals. I closed my eyes again.
What did they mean, really, by “follow your breath”? Where was I supposed to follow it? In. Out. I saw the breath like a piston sliding back and forth. In. Out. Or like a…no, don’t think about that. Maybe I would meet a guy at one of the ashrams, someone really spiritual with a buff yoga body who was just coming off his vows of celibacy.
My knee hurt. I must concentrate harder. I would be like those Tibetan monks who meditate outside in the snow for hours, drying wet blankets with their body heat alone and learning to love their Chinese torturers.
Brrringgg. I reflexively started to reach for the phone, then restrained myself. Brrrinng. Was I missing my appointment for my hepatitis vaccination? No, that was tomorrow. Brinngg. The answering machine clicked on. I heard my own taped voice, which always sounded more uncertain than I imagined it would: “Hi, this is Amanda. When you hear the beep, you know what to do.”
The long beep. Then a voice that made my stomach leap:
“Amanda. Hi. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me. But I really want to talk to you.”
THERE WAS A MEMORY I returned to again and again, when I found myself wondering what I was doing still hanging out with Matt. It was my birthday, a few months after we’d met. He’d driven me up Mount Tamalpais, parked the car by a bluff overlooking Stinson Beach, and told me we were going hang gliding.
“For my birthday present, you’re pushing me off a cliff?” Two thousand feet below us, the ocean glittered under a cloudless sky.
“Not pushing. I’m jumping off with you.”
“But you know I’m terrified of heights.
“That’s why it’s the perfect gift.”
I’d only agreed because my fear of looking like a coward in front of my new lover was greater than my fear of crashing to a horrible death. But when I was finally airborne—strapped into a tandem hang glider with a bald instructor built like a paratrooper—my terror became so intense that it was indistinguishable from ecstasy. A red-tailed hawk soared below me. My heartbeat pounded in the top of my skull. Every nerve felt electric. I could see the arc of the Golden Gate Bridge, the rocky curve of the coastline thousands of feet below. An updraft spiraled us higher and higher, the earth dropping away. I could see Matt’s glider a few hundred feet away, rising and falling on the wind. I swore that if I landed safely, I’d never do such an idiotic thing again. But as we began to ease into our landing, I suddenly wanted the flight to go on forever.
“I’M JUST IN town for a week or two, then I’m off again,” said the voice on the answering machine. Lori once told me that when a certain species of bee flaps its wings, it hums at a particular pitch that causes the blossoms on tomato plants to open wide and eject their pollen. This was how Matt’s voice hit me. Don’t pick up the phone. Whatever you do, don’t pick up the phone. I o
pened my eyes and looked at the Buddha on the altar again. He had the right idea, slipping away in the middle of the night when his wife couldn’t say a word to him. Did he ever yearn for her, sitting up nights with all those holy men? Suppose when he was meditating under that tree, an answering machine had clicked on nearby and he’d heard a voice: Sweetheart, I miss you so much, please come home, your son’s been asking for you…
“I really felt terrible about how we left things last time. I need to talk to you face-to-face…”
What did the Buddha know about passion, anyway? He lived as a monk for most of his life. Why would I listen to his advice?
“Amanda. I know you’re there.”
Don’t pick up the phone. I was getting up off the cushion. I was reaching for the phone. I felt the wind pulling me up and out over the ocean, heard the sound of seagulls calling as the earth tilted below.
My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed of pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire.
—Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981)
CHAPTER 4
DON’T DO IT. Do not get together with him.” Lori stepped over a pile of laundry and stood in the center of my room, her hands on her hips, glaring at me. “I’m warning you. That guy is poison for you.”
“Come on, Lori.” I sat down on the edge of my bed, wondering if inviting her over to help me pack had been such a good idea after all. “It’s just a walk on the beach. I’m leaving in a week. How bad can it be?”
“I don’t care. It’s like an alcoholic saying he’s going to stop in at a bar and just order orange juice.”
“Well, we’re not going to a bar. How much trouble can we get into on a beach in broad daylight?”
