Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  "Oh, I see," he smiled. "Actually, Berkeley isn't that ordinary, you know. Once you get to know it, you find it's full of exotic people."

  I chuckled. At least he hadn't denied being one of them.

  I lit another cigarette and Shura talked about the changes in the East Bay since the time his parents first moved there, the wild animals and the birds, the snakes and spiders which had lived all around them, and he listed the ones that had gradually disappeared as the roads had come in and more houses were built on the hills. When he mentioned the black widows, I said, "Surely you don't miss them7" "Yes, I do. I'm saddened when any form of life is pushed out by people. It's happening too often and too fast, and it means the natural balance of things is being upset in too many places."

  "I understand; I share that concern. It's just that - well, it's hard for me to feel too much sympathy for the black widow."

  "You learn to live with dangerous spiders, just as you do with other forms of life. Usually, if you leave them alone they'll do the same to you. By the way," he leaned forward, "Have you ever examined a black widow web?"

  "No, I can't remember ever seeing one. Why?"

  "They're quite extraordinary. Very, very strong silk. It's so strong, in fact, that it was used in World War II for the cross-hairs in gunsights. Did you know that?"

  "No," I said, "I didn't."

  I watched him as he talked about how you could tell when it was a black widow web by testing one of the strands with a finger and if it was, the strand would spring back like elastic. His body was relaxed, the long legs sprawled on the mat. I remembered the wonderful smell in the hollow under his arm/ a smell of grass and something like carnations.

  Maybe marigolds. Not carnations. Marigolds. How many men in the world have armpits that smell like that? There just isn't anything about this beautiful creature that I don't like. Not so far, anyway.

  I must have smiled, because he stopped and looked at me, questioningly.

  "Sorry," I said, "I was listening to you, but a nice memory rose up suddenly."

  I waited for him to ask me what the memory was, but instead he pulled himself up and padded across the floor to the kitchen. I rose and followed him, holding out my cup. He silently poured coffee for us both, and I added sugar to mine. As we returned to our pillow fortress, I felt a change. Something was different.

  He said nothing for a moment, apparently concentrating on his coffee. Then he raised his head and looked straight at me, not smiling. I stayed quiet and waited.

  "Alice, I have to tell you something. I'd better say it now. Remember, I promised to tell you the truth, no matter how hard it might be. I'm not used to doing that; I haven't made a habit of it in my relationships, perhaps because it usually seemed kinder to other people if I kept my feelings to myself. The negative ones, anyway. I have a tendency to be sharp, I suppose, and people can be hurt. Even my closest friends have said I have a cruel tongue - " He paused.

  What in God's name are you going to tell me? I'd better be ready for something bad. Oh, please, don't let it be too bad, please. 1 love you. Shura was saying, "Not very long ago, I decided -1 made a decision to be who I am and say what I think and feel and those who can't accept that and be equally open and honest with me -" he leaned forward, "I have things I want to do - must do - and I don't know how much time I have, and I don't want to waste any more time or energy than I have to, on people who play games or deal in half-truths. Not at this stage of my life."

  There was a faint bitterness in his voice.

  Is he talking about Ursula?

  I said, softly, "Yes."

  Yes to you. Yes to telling truth. Yes to your beautiful big hands and intuitive fingers and all the rest of you. What are you trying to say?

  He took a deep breath, then said, "Ursula called me from Germany last night, before I came to the party, and it seems she can - she'll be coming to be with me for while. I'm meeting her plane tomorrow morning."

  He looked up at the big windows, then back at me. "I don't know how long she'll stay this time. She never really says anything I can count on; it's usually T may be able to stay a week or two,' or she says she doesn't know - that it depends on how Dolph is coming to terms with the situation, or something else equally hard to pin down. She's a wonderfully gentle, kind person and can't bear to cause anyone pain. So I just have to continue being patient and let her work it through her own way."

  I drank some coffee because suddenly my mouth was very dry.

  "So all I can tell you is that she's coming and she'll be with me a week or a couple of weeks, or maybe she'll actually stay this time. I just don't know."

  I'd had many years of practice in keeping both my voice and my face calm under fire. I made a deliberate effort to relax the muscles of my throat before I spoke.

  "Thank you for telling me, Shura. I don't know what to say except that I can't wish both of you luck. I wish myself the luck, to be honest, because I would like very much to be with you, as I told you last night."

  My actual words had been, "I'm in love with you," but there was no need to repeat them; he would remember if he wanted to.

  "Alice, I want you to hear what I say now. I enjoy being with you. Very, very much. Last night - last night was - it was a beautiful gift. I had a great need for what you gave me. You're the last person I want to hurt in any way. I just don't know what's going to happen, and I realize it's all very unfair to you, and there's nothing I can do to make it easier. For myself or for you."

  I couldn't let him go any further along that road, so I interrupted, "No, no. Please don't do that. I mean, don't try to avoid hurting me. If I were really that afraid of - of heartache - I wouldn't have asked you to stay last night. Don't push me out of your life until you know you have to, until you know that she's really going to stay. I promise you, if things turn out that way, I'll go quietly. But until then, trust me to survive whatever happens. I'm really a very strong person, you know."

  My hand had found its way onto his knee. He covered it with his own.

  I continued, "I would appreciate it very much if you could let me know what's going on - as soon as you have some idea, yourself. Could you just give me a quick phone call, perhaps, so I don't have to spend a lot of time wondering? Would you mind doing that?"

  Shura met my eyes and his gaze was dark and intense, " promise you, I'll phone as soon as I have any idea of what the situation is. I certainly won't leave you in the dark."

  At the door, he looked down at me, then wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the floor. His mouth came down on mine, and I lost myself for a moment in the taste of him, the feel of lips that were achingly familiar, by now. Finally, he put me back on my feet and held me at arms' length for a moment, his eyes moving over my face and body, as if memorizing.

  He whispered, "Thank you, little one."

  Then he was gone. I became aware of the faint prickling around my mouth from his mustache and beard. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a fresh cup of coffee and took it back to the mat, where I settled down to do the crying.

  CHAPTER 21. DOOR OPENING

  I thought of it as The Closing of the Door, complete with capitals. It was the first time I'd cried because of Shura.

  I went to work as usual and took care of the children, and the next weekend I attended a Mensa party, carrying my bottle of cranberry juice laced with vodka, and my little folding magnetic chess set. I played a couple of good games, drank enough to make me dangerously sleepy driving back home, and resolved never to risk disaster that way again.

  Brian had his eyes checked and we discovered that he needed glasses for reading. We spent a long time fooling around in a store where they sell frames, laughing at how he looked in some of the fancy ones, settling finally for something that looked like him - quiet, a bit serious, not liable to attract attention.

  Brian had always been a good-looking boy, with curly brown hair and large, blue-grey eyes.

  When he was in the second grade - his year of humilia
tion and terror - his handsomeness gave the young bullies who scapegoated him for his dyslexia that much more reason to tease, poke and kick. Now/ at 14, he didn't have to fear the same kind of persecution, and the girls were beginning to notice him. I knew he wasn't the kind to attract the jock-chasers, but the more interesting, thoughtful girls would begin to seek him out. The second grade had taught him to be inconspicuous; I often urged him to ask questions in class, but understood his preference for getting help from teachers only after the rest of the students had filed out the door.

  I hadn't hauled Brian out of the second grade because, at the time, I thought the teachers knew more than I did when they told me that my son had to undergo his trial by fire with no help from them, because that's the way things were among small boys, that every year there was one singled out to be the scapegoat, and there was nothing they could do about it. He'll survive it, they said; he'll be all right. I had long talks with Brian about the psychology of bullying children, but it didn't help much. He would carry the scars from that year for a long time, and when, years later, I understood that the teachers had been wrong, I also understood that I would always carry in myself the bitter knowledge that I could have, and indeed should have, taken him out of his hell and put him in some other school, after confronting both administrators and teachers and demanding that they change their policy of resignation and indifference to the scapegoating. They wouldn't have changed anything, of course, but I should have said it anyway.

  There was, however, one positive result of Brian's ordeal; he developed, very early, an ability to empathize with others - usually schoolmates - in trouble, to listen patiently to their tales of sadness and fear. I thought he was showing signs of being the kind of person who becomes a therapist, a healer of emotionally damaged people; he had the heart and clearness of mind for it.

  My lovely Ann was discovering that she enjoyed math and science, and that she was good at both of them. Her directness, her habit of saying exactly what she thought, sometimes without sufficient efforts at diplomacy, earned her some enemies and a growing number of good friends. She was beginning to attract boys, of course, and I was trying to be as subtly persuasive as possible about the advantages of playing the field before relinquishing one's virginity. Not certain I could win this particular battle - not even sure I was going to know when the battle began or who the enemy would be, for that matter - I took her to the family doctor to be started on The Pill.

  She tried marijuana for the first time, at a high school friend's party, and got very sick on the lawn; that was the end of her experimentation with psychoactive drugs.

  Wendy and Brian were as uncomfortable with math as I had been, but both of them were showing unquestionable gifts in art. Brian had recently won a school award for a piece of work he'd done on leather, an engraving of a magnificent dragon, breathing fire in the best dragon tradition. We had it framed and hung on a living room wall.

  Wendy had been so sensitive as a child to the slightest sign of parental displeasure, Walter and I had dreaded exposing her to the brutal realities of school, and were surprised - astounded, in fact - at the ease with which she made friends and charmed teachers. Our vulnerable Wendy, it seemed, was a lot tougher than we'd thought, and her social skills had flowered with every passing month. She was now a beautiful girl who - like her siblings - showed a certain gentleness in her face, and had a quick, whimsical sense of humor.

  My oldest, my son Christopher, born of a very brief and bitter marriage to a fellow art student when I was 19, was living in a town a couple of hours away by car, to the north. He was teaching in a private school, and had already made me a grandmother twice over with two little boys. I saw him and his wife, Jane, very seldom, because of the distance and my lack of free time, but whenever I visited them, I was aware of feeling great affection for Jane. She was thin, shy and as poor a housekeeper as I, but a very good, caring, attentive mother. Jane had shown an unexpected strength in her determination to keep her marriage intact, which wasn't particularly easy, with a husband who tended to be exacting, and impatient with household disorganization, a legacy of his years with his abusive stepmother, Irene. She had demanded of him a military-school neatness, and struck him for minor infractions of her many rules, telling him constantly how stupid and impossible he was.

  I had failed to rescue Christopher, too, many years earlier. After divorcing his father, at age 21,1 had lived with my small child in the only place - a housing project apartment - we could afford, on the little money Dick could give us; a young commercial artist couldn't earn very much, unless he somehow managed to get one of the rare jobs available in the advertising department of a large retail store like Macy's or The Emporium.

  Christopher and I had lived the kind of life everyone in a housing project used to live, before the age of crack cocaine. There was not as much crime at that time as there was later, but I soon discovered that in places like Sunnydale, those who steal prey on others as deprived as themselves. I learned what it was to be really poor, what it does to the human spirit. I avoided pretty store windows at Christmas time, and told my parents that the baby and I were doing well, but that this wasn't the right moment to visit us, that we would much rather visit them, instead. My father, recovering from a heart attack, had no money to spare, and I knew they would be upset if they saw the place I was living in. So the baby and I went to see them, instead, now and then.

  It was in the housing project that I began to experience a dreadful tiredness, an emotional dullness that would not lift. I stopped listening to classical music; it stirred feelings I couldn't trust myself to handle. Beauty hurt me. I didn't know I was suffering from an illness known as depression;

  I thought that I was, for the first time in my life, seeing the world as it really was, a place of struggle and pain and betrayal, all of it meaningless, a place in which only self-deluded, naive people hoped tor things to get better and happier.

  Much later, during my marriage to Walter, I read the newspaper accounts and watched the television coverage of the riots in a suburb of Los Angeles called Watts. In a grocery store, one day, I heard two housewives, behind me in the checkout line, expressing indignation at the way some of the poor people in Watts had looted the shops, not for food, but for television sets and other luxuries. I tightened my jaw against a surge of anger and suddenly realized that I knew something these comfortable women had no way of knowing - that food is not enough; that sometimes a person who has been poor for many years is hungrier for some pretty, sparkling, impractical thing than for bread, and that a television set is what everybody else has, a symbol of everything he is denied. It wasn't right or good, but I understood it.

  Some evenings, in Sunnydale, I played poker for pennies with the only friends I had there, a black couple with two small sons. Most evenings, I read books from the library. It was only while I was reading that the sad, dry ugliness disappeared and I forgot to be afraid. I took care of my baby, but he must have tuned in to my depression, as babies always share the psychic field of the parent, and the greyness in my soul surely invaded him at the deepest level.

  I found work in the pathology department of a San Francisco hospital, typing tissue biopsy reports and autopsies, and I put my little boy in a place which called itself a nursery school and I worried when I picked him up every evening because he didn't laugh or even smile very much. But then, I didn't either, in those days.

  So, when Dick told me he was going to marry a wonderful girl who was a graduate of a good college, and argued that Christopher would have a good home with them, I thought about it for a long time, feeling a kind of pain in my chest which I'd never felt before, and finally said yes, as long as I could see him as often as I wanted. When he was gone, I cried in the silence, but told myself I'd done what was best for him. I felt inadequate, and I didn't know how to be otherwise, and my baby deserved a real home with a good, cheerful mother.

  After a while, Irene and Dick asked me to limit my visits to twice a month, so t
hat my son could have a chance to fully accept his new life. He was upset, they explained, when I left at the end of my hours with him. I said all right, because I didn't know what else to say, and because the two of them together conveyed a sense of cool authority that made me feel alone and helpless.

  I moved out of the Sunnydale housing project, to a small apartment a few blocks below the hospital where I worked, and I saw my little son two weekends a month, traveling by bus to Marin County, until Dick and Irene told me that more often than once a month was disruptive and disturbing to Christopher's security and routine. I felt, again, like an unwashed peasant bargaining with the people who dress in silk, and I acquiesced.

  When my boy told me that his stepmother sometimes hit him, I persuaded myself it was childish exaggeration; I held him, kissed him and took him to places where we could have fun.

  It wasn't until years later, after he had one step-brother and then a step-sister, that I let myself hear the depression in his voice, but when I screwed up my courage to tell his parents what was disturbing me, I was met with appalling fury, outraged denials of mistreatment, and an increase in the freezing hostility which they had, for some time, made no attempt to hide. I was too unsure, too powerless, to continue asking difficult questions, so I assured myself that at least Christopher was a member of a real family, that he had a stepmother who could stay home and siblings to grow up with, whereas I could give him none of those things.

  When Christopher was a grown man, beginning his own family, he finally told me what Irene had done to him, how she had treated him, especially after she had her own children; he recounted the physical blows, the humiliations, the attacks on his self-esteem. I cursed and wanted to kill her. And I hated myself for not finding out, for not having taken him away, not having somehow saved him. We talked and cried and I asked him to forgive me, for having been young and bewildered and blind.

  Christopher said that he had managed to become friendly with Irene since she had divorced his father and remarried. He said she treated him well, now that he was an adult - too big to hit or humiliate - and that he had forgiven her, ever since she had made an effort, one day, to apologize for her mistakes, for having made things very hard for him when he was young.