by Iyer, Pico
He went out onto the small deck—she smiled up at him, wide awake—and the warm night hit him after the artificial cool inside.
“Coming in?”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Really? Just for a minute?”
“I think I should be getting to sleep. I have to leave early in the morning.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport.” She was on the verge of asking right out.
“Martine,” he said, though it was another name he was thinking of. “I don’t think your sister would approve.”
She looked away—explanations were a worse blow to pride than the rejection, especially when they said, so flagrantly, that they were taking your pride into consideration. A little later, as he lay on the couch, he heard her coming in, bare feet walking heavily on the plush carpet, and the door to the bedroom closing with surprising force.
In the morning, she was quick to remind him that his presence was no longer required—“I ought to be calling Martine for her birthday,” she said, as he kissed her goodbye—and to tell him that he wasn’t what her sister wanted, either. As he walked out into the corridor, he saw himself, a year before, opening his address book and seeing the date written out in a boy’s hopeful hand. It would be one year to the day this weekend.
Sitting at his desk, he thought again about what the poems said: Give up on hope and you might as well give up on life. Give up on hope— this their shadow meaning now—and you were betraying what you claimed to hold. Doing, in fact, what he had always found so saddening in her: accepting defeat as a fact of life.
He picked up the phone, the madness still alive in him, and said, “Camilla: there’s a special occasion coming up and I wondered if you’d be interested in joining me for it. A first anniversary of sorts. An achievement. I’ll be marking the historic moment at seven p.m. this Sunday: I’m inviting a lot of people, but all of them are you.” A year ago he’d have thought this pure insanity: masochism, or stubborn blindness, a refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past. But why had he come to California if not to step out of the range of such a voice?
He spent the next day making up a map—their map, the one they’d superimposed upon the world—and he drew up a kind of treasure hunt, as if a personal version of the Sufi metaphor. If she followed the instructions, she would start at the CD player and activate the song of Zanzibar (the second drive in the hills, the mist coming in and out of the car as they drove past turns), then open the refrigerator to take out the mango juice akin to what she’d given him in her sister’s kitchen. Step 3 would lead her to the bed, where Yeats lay beside the candle with the colors of Isfahan. Step 4 would lead to what lay beside the candle and the book, which was him. Step 5—or so his instructions put it—would lead to herself, and the better person she always longed to find.
In other circumstances he would have shuddered at the foolishness of this; not long ago, he’d have looked at it with Nigel’s eyes, or Alex’s. But part of the point of the whole exercise was to show how “foolishness” could be redeeming sometimes: “You know ‘silly’ comes from the Old English sælig, meaning ‘blessed,’ ” she had said once, with her unfailing gift for surprise, and he had replied, “As ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek for ‘private person.’ ”
He pinned the note on the door at six-forty-five, and though the wind was up, the piece of paper was secure. It was still light, as it had been on the early drives, and the new candles he’d bought would keep on burning for several hours. He hadn’t rung her to confirm she was coming; this was about a leap of faith, after all, a venturing of something in spite of everything that had passed. Die to expectations, and abandon your petty pride.
He waited and waited, and at nine o’clock—the light had faded over the ocean now, and the night sounds had begun—he got up and took the note down from the door. He pushed the PAUSE button down on the CD player, he blew out all the candles. Déjà-vu, he thought, can sometimes mean “twice shy.”
A little before dawn, though it seemed several lives had passed through his head as he lay in the bed, the sentiments of the poems blurring into the life that was actually unraveling, and the arguments in his head gaining force and persuasiveness, as if they could put disappointment in a box—he heard a tapping at the window. A soft tap, unmistakable—it brought back taps and taps of many months before. He buried himself deeper in the sheets, and then he realized he was turning into her again: inviting someone to come and hiding when she arrived.
“Hello? Anybody home?” It was, as ever, her sweetest and most hopeful voice, the one she knew he couldn’t turn away from.
“Hello? Johno? Are you there? It’s me; I’m sorry I’m late.”
To close the door on her was, in a sense, to give in to her, and admit that all her “monsters,” as she often called them, were right; he’d put himself in a position in which he had to open up.
“Johno—you must be here. I saw your car outside. I’m bringing a surprise.”
The high, sweet voice kept calling and calling, the tapping went on against the screen door, and finally he went over and opened the door.
“Thank you. I’ve brought everything.”
In one great leap she collapsed onto the sofa, and books, brochures, tapes, and packages spilled out. She’d even brought a bottle for the party of ten hours before.
“I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to get everything just right.” What could he say?
“At first I was scared,” she went on, “and then I thought, ‘He doesn’t like me to be scared. I’ll give him a present he’ll never forget.’ ”
“Why should you be scared? I invited you.”
“I know. But”—she looked at him, as if surprised—“you’re mad, aren’t you?”
“Not mad. Just defeated. You win. I give up.”
“What do you mean?” For the first time something else came out of her voice, from behind the cheer. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing. You’re right. I was stupid to think otherwise. You win.”
“I brought you this,” she said, and pulled out, fumbling at the bag, what looked to be a coffee-table book, in wrapping the color of imagined stars.
“Thank you.”
“You’re not going to open it?”
“Later, perhaps. At some more propitious moment.” He took it over to the bedroom closet, and put it away in a corner.
“I wanted everything to be perfect.”
“I’m sure you did. I know.” The fight was out of him, and his very lack of temper terrified her.
“I knew you’d be mad at me. It’s what Greg said, too.”
He handed over, without a word, the present he’d bought for her—a small dime-store ring in which two waves intertwined so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. “I’m really tired. I hope you’ll excuse me.” Politeness in him meant distance: it was the wall he put up that was more resistant than any locked door. If he didn’t leave now, the thought came, they’d burn so many bridges they wouldn’t even be able to say hello again.
Up in the hills, the sun was just rising over the farthest mountain, and by the time he’d reached the spot below “their house,” there was nothing but a sea of clouds below. Truly one could feel a god here, dangerously far from everything that aged or died.
“Maybe you’re late,” he said to himself, more vocal alone than he could be with her, “because you’re late. Not because of what your parents did to you twenty years ago. Not because of any elaborate psychological mechanisms and a fear of intimacy, and a stubborn determination to destroy what you love. Not even because you want at some level to make things go wrong so that you can hide inside the comfort of your fears. Maybe you’re late just because you’re not good with time. As people have been late for centuries.”
What the absent spirit might have said, he could not hear. When he got back to the house, the early morning already feeling exhausted, she was seated in the bed, bent over, writing a message of some kind on a large pap
er towel (the letters already blearing on the rough surface). She’d let down her hair and changed into her white nightdress; he could see the gloss she’d applied with her thin pencil. The strand of pearls around the pale neck said this was a person he couldn’t hurt.
“Are you coming to bed?” she said, as if the world had just begun.
“Sorry. That’s the last place I want to be.”
“Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”
“I don’t think so. The part you probably want to touch went into cold storage sometime late last night.”
“I wrote you this.” She presented the paper towel to him as a little girl might show her parents the text on which her teacher had written “A.” Already the words were wavering, almost blotched beyond his comprehension.
“I can understand if you never want to see me again. I’d never want to see me again if I were you. I never want to see me again even though I’m not you. I bet it feels like you’ve gone to all this trouble for nothing. It’s not for nothing, but there’s nothing I can say to make you believe that. I think I’ve used up all my IOUs. You’ve tried so hard to get the better of my demons, and I don’t think anyone could try harder. But they’ve been in there a long time, and they don’t give up easily. I could get down on my knees and say, ‘Please, please, please don’t give up on me.’ But I’d only disappoint you again before long, and then I’d have to watch your heart break over and over. I guess the only thing I can say is ‘I’m here if you want me.’ ”
Someone crying out for help, and yet, if he extended a hand to help her, he’d be pulled into the dark swamp, too. The Sufis never dealt with someone from a culture that hasn’t had a chance to grow up or lay down roots.
“I wish it were different,” he said, “but I’ve only got a few weeks left, and the fellowship . . .”
“I know. If we go on like this, we won’t even be friends any more.”
“See you in a few weeks, maybe.”
“Maybe,” she said, and when she walked to the door a little later, in her scruffiest clothes, she took even the candle by the bedside.
IV
Almost as soon as he heard the sound of the huge car turning the far corner, he threw himself into his poems with a cold fury, and though some of what he wanted to say, and what they said to him, sounded flat now, as remote as another man’s prayer, some of it came to sudden life. The words came out in one impersonal rush, and he congratulated himself on having mistakenly destroyed the strange final chapter. “It’s your way of being personal, I suppose,” Martine had said in Paris, “returning to the impersonal. But it doesn’t help much with the washing up.”
The chapter he wrote now was on “Metaphor and Coincidence,” and it was about how, if you live far enough away from the world, everything you do is a symbol, because the person who is doing it is not the person who will die. You enter a mythic space of sorts—a place where there aren’t any clocks—and everything carries a resonance deeper than itself. You aren’t yourself, but something more, and so everything you do, everywhere you go, takes on a different meaning. An abandoned house becomes an emblem of a future of which you can make anything you choose. The desert becomes the place where there are no props or signs or coordinates and the only protectors are wind and silence and space. The person you love becomes a hope.
The chapters came quickly now, and for a moment he felt himself back in the very space that Rumi had admitted him to: the rarefied, charged space where a door means an opening, and the city walls speak for the defenses you’ve built up. Metaphor was critical to the Sufis, he found himself thinking, because it was itself a metaphor: it said that behind the things we see, behind the people who speak, there lies another dimension, and that other person sees even the things of the world in the light of the eternal. “The nature of growth—of love or faith or anything—is that the person who thinks in terms of appointments and plans and dates gives way to the person who thinks of something deeper. The literal world cedes to the allegorical, and the geometric box from the marketplace becomes an emblem of God.”
Occasionally, carried away by his chapter, he thought back to the first Persian poem he’d ever read—FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám, the most popular translation in the English language other than the Bible, so they said—and tried to imagine how some unknown Victorian might take the sentiments of the Persians and organize them into tidy quatrains.
If, with the fire of love I burn,
Away, away, I hope you’ll turn,
And yet, when all the earth is scorched,
I’ll leave you with a single torch
A torch to light your slow, sad way,
A torch to turn the night to day;
A torch to guide you through the dark,
Until, unknowing, you embark
On boats that pass across the seas,
Sudden as lightning, not by degrees,
To a place you know as your deepest home,
Next to me, and my love, in a gold-blue dome.
When he finished, though, he realized that his efforts were poorer by far than hers, as if he wanted to box up what he cared about into jokes or crossword puzzles. Precisely the habit that had made him saddest of all in her: to pretend to be a smaller person than she was.
The English word “symbol,” he remembered, comes from the Greek symbolon, referring to one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Only when the two halves, the two people, are brought together does the whole have a meaning. “A metaphor is a species of symbol”—the words of Edward Hirsch jumped out at him from a book. “So is a lover.”
That night, the next night, every night of the week, she kept him company as he’d feared she would. In the bed, hair falling about her face, soft hands reaching down, grey eyes losing focus, turning smoky. Years of reading Sufis, and he’d turned into an adolescent. When he got up to steady himself by reading the poems, he found, as he might have known had he been more conscious, that they were exactly what he didn’t want to hear. He put them down as if he’d picked up burning metal.
Though he went to the library in the days—an uncontaminated space—she stole out towards him in the stacks, or suddenly appeared at the carrel where he’d been sitting the day after New Mexico, the morning of Kevin’s seminar. He picked up a book called Farsi Verse Forms, and a piece of paper fell out from it: a picture of a tower, with a star above it, and a spiral staircase in its belly, going up and up to a figure with long hair falling to her waist. It looked like her—it looked like hers—but it might have been someone else, an accident playing on an overprepared mind. At the back of the book, he saw that it had been taken out from the library only two weeks before.
That night, “Johno” at his ears, her eyes fluttering as they did when her lips began to part. The feel of her mouth against his throat, her hair brushing his hips, and then the great gulps with which she’d cry, letting her face collapse into the vagueness that she feared.
A week or so later, the deadline still ticking away on his desk, everywhere he turned in the apartment, a letter arrived, the first one she’d ever sent him through the mail. The lettering was clear, as if she’d written it and written it beforehand; the postmark said “Los Angeles.”
“Dear Johno,” it began, and it was surprisingly free of crossings-out,
I won’t say I’m missing you because you’d rather that I didn’t. You don’t like me to be negative or to talk about what I don’t have when I do have so much to be thankful for. And I won’t say, either, that I haven’t thought of you—and thought of you and thought of you, till it all runs out in a wet mess. You said something about how what I called “love” was really “need.” But at the level where I feel it, the words don’t matter. It all hurts just the same.
I ask myself, when I’m feeling up to it, where did I go wrong? Did I make a mistake in loving you, or in not loving you enough? Was my mistake in admitting that I might miss you forever, or in acting as if
I wouldn’t? Now you’ll say I’m sounding like a movie again, and maybe I am, because movies are about something real: much realer than those books you hide behind.
This is the part of the letter where I’m supposed to say something constructive. About everything I’ve learned, and how I’ve gained so much from loss. Just like your Sufis do. But I’m not you, and I don’t have your spirit of sweet hopefulness. I’d love to share it but I can’t. My experience doesn’t bear it out.
So now I’m sounding senseless, and you can tell yourself you’re well rid of someone so negative and self-pitying and crazy. And there’s nothing I can say to that—I never could see why you had any time for me. Once you said I was full of false confidence, and another time you said I was scared, and I don’t think you could see they came from the same place. Just different ways of making the same plea.
I sound like you, don’t I? Everyone says I do—at least I sound different since we began spending time together. Your marks are all over me, inside and out. Everywhere I turn in me, I find the residue of you. I’ll probably be in a new relationship by the time you get this, but you’ll know it’s not really me that’s in it.
So here I am writing you a letter that sounds like an accusation. Which is my point, I guess. Even my love letters to you sound like accusations.
Oh well, I hope you’re okay, and making up ground with your thesis. Maybe we can meet again when it’s all over. Then you can tell me what you think of my present.
Is it sunny where you are? You always did love the light.
Love,
your faithful Camel
(or should I say, “Need, your faithful Camel”?)
The present! Absentmindedness is a sign of transport, the Sufis said; Rumi longed to be absentminded. But in his case, it felt only as if he’d caught the local attention span. He opened the closet door, and there it sat in the corner, in its shining paper of silver and gold, as sad as a Valentine at a funeral. He closed the closet door, and the package filled the room (as the unknown manuscripts of Rumi, once he heard about them, instantly effaced all the manuscripts he had). Every door you didn’t open—he thought of their early nights together—becomes a potency, infused with magic.
