Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  As he stood still and watched, the other women fidgeted. She did not. After a while she reached for a small brass cup that she held carefully in the palm of one hand. In the other she picked up a small mallet. She tapped the cup with the mallet, leaving the mallet against it so there was a dull clunky sound. Then she hit it fully. The little cup rang out, a bell to signal the end of the meditation. The clear, bright sound seemed to awaken the air, the pines, and ferns, seemed to awaken him. She held the bell until the ringing stopped. She put it down and placed both hands together, palm to palm, under her lips and bowed slightly to each of the other women, as they did to her.

  Then she saw him. Without surprise—as if expecting him to be there—she held his gaze. The moment was riveting.

  She bowed to him. He didn’t know what to do. And then, smiling, feeling terribly awkward, he hastily put his palms together under his chin and bowed back to her.

  With a certain grace she unwrapped herself from her lotus and stood up. She said something in Italian to the others and they, too, stood. As they began their yoga on the mat of pine needles in the glen, he walked away. Something else had happened. That’s all he knew, right then, that something else had happened, and that he had to find out what. Their attraction was magnetic.

  To him she was white linen and dark secrets, alive in a world different than he had ever experienced—a world he had learned, on the conveyer belt of American medicine, to discount. To her he was Western science and American optimism, hiding under a cynical edge that prompted her to see his potential. In each conversation she said things that at first seemed preposterous but which, as they went deeper, made more and more sense. One day he realized that her worldview seemed to encompass his but not vice-versa. He was enticed and challenged by this idea. He didn’t understand what she was saying a lot of the time and understood even less about her meditative practices. But in it all there was a surprising glimmer of possibility for him, which he sensed was a possible end to his hurt, his cynicism, his suffering.

  Their lovemaking sealed it. He was exuberant and boyish, she explosive and tantric. Here, too, at first, she was surprising and exotic. But as they got to know each other, the tantric peeled away, and they were left with the ordinary sensual pleasure and playfulness of two people daring to hope—as if some of Celestina’s Indian stuff was a protection against being at the mercy of love.

  Like all the rest of us, he said to himself at the time, yes.

  After two weeks together in May at the sports center, they were crazed with each other. During their first month apart they called each other at least twice a day and sent flowers and silly gifts.

  In June Celestina returned to Amsterdam for a retreat led by an Indian teacher, a woman whom she had studied with in Mount Abu, India. Orville attended a few lectures. He was impressed with the power of the teacher and the depth of Celestina’s understanding, but it wasn’t for him. Each talk was preceded by a thirty-minute meditation, a sitting in silence “following the breath.” He sat there, knees aching, back sore, going bananas. It seemed like forever. Celestina asked him what it was like.

  “Garbage,” he said. “My mind is full of garbage.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? How is that good?”

  “It is true. It is your karma.”

  “The karma of garbage?”

  “For you, it is a gift.”

  Orville groaned. “I don’t think so. You do it. I’ll watch.”

  “Just come to her last lecture tomorrow. For our sake, okay?”

  The last lecture was on psychological suffering. The root of psychological suffering, so said the Indian guru, lay in comparing yourself to others. The trap is in the process of becoming rather than being. “The flowering of being,” she said, “puts an end to all psychological suffering.”

  Afterward, as they walked arm in arm back to the Canal House, their hotel, both were quiet. Neither spoke about the lecture until they were at the hotel. Sitting in their room overlooking the Keizersgracht, Orville said, “You know, I have to admit it made some sense, what she said. I mean, in terms of my life.”

  “Good,” she said, casually. “What shall we do for dinner?”

  “I mean, there’s something there, something new. My whole life I’ve been into comparing, competing, being someone special. She made sense to me.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I watch you listen to her. Your ears get bigger.”

  “You mean I heard what she was saying.”

  “No, I mean as you listened to her talk, your ears really did get bigger. You understood something, sì?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bene. Now let it go.”

  “Can’t we talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not about the words. The word is not the thing. If something happened, it will last. Can we have fish?”

  He was surprised at this, that she didn’t want to talk about it. But then he realized how he loved that in her, her being always surprising. With her that night, he felt light of heart, happy. It was a wonderful night. They did eat at a fish place. They walked the humpbacked bridges over the canals, dodged the bicycles, walked the cobblestones, stared longingly at the lights in the waters. It was as close to her as he had ever felt, as if their love was lightening up the whole damn world.

  The next morning he put her on the train back to Rome with plans for him to come to Italy for a holiday in a few weeks.

  After she’d gone he couldn’t forget what she had said, about the garbage of his mind being his gift, his way to be free. When he called her a few days later and said he was trying to meditate for short periods, she screeched with delight.

  “Sì, sì,” she said, “you never forget what you understand.”

  In July Orville went to Italy. They had arranged to take a long holiday together. He had decided on a surprise of his own. He had quit his job at Camp Zeist. At the end of their holiday he would tell Celestina that he was moving to Rome to be with her.

  They met up in Venice, rented a car, and drove through the Dolomites, doing the lakes east to west: the ominous Garda nestled up under the Swiss Alps, the terrific Lugano and calm Como, the seedy Maggiore, and, finally, the tiny gem of Orta, an afterthought which, like so many afterthoughts, was the most exquisite of all. But for the conflict around Celestina’s insistence on staying at the finest hotels and eating at expensive restaurants, this time together had deepened and broadened their love.

  They discovered that their birthdays were only two days apart: on July 22 she was thirty-four, and on July 24 he was thirty-nine. He asked if she believed in astrology.

  “No way! You think I am some kind of lightweight? Astrology is the New Age fluff, for those seeking a spiritual shortcut. The real path is hard. The Eight-Fold Path is made of rock.”

  For her birthday he gave her a smooth oval of black marble that fit into her palm, a stone on which was etched

  NOTHING IS ETCHED IN STONE

  She gave him a watch, on whose face, in the place of each of the twelve numbers, was the word

  NOW

  Now, having strolled around the tiny island, they sat outdoors for an afternoon wine at a trattoria shaded by a pleached arbor of Muscat grapes. Members of a large Italian family sat nearby, a family in which, to Orville’s doctor’s eye, obesity ran, if not raced. The family members were eating, laughing, sometimes singing. The wine went to Orville’s head. The scene began to float and fuzz, as if all the elements—humans, chairs, wineglasses, forks, pasta, and grapes were levitating, a little. He closed his eyes, feeling the heat on his lids, as if the sun were sunning herself there.

  There was a stir. The bufala mozzarella had arrived, shipped fresh all the way from Napoli. The Italian family went wild, falling on it like chubby bears on a honey pot.
Great white chunks flopped in the sunlight, floated, disappeared into mouths, muffling the peals of laughter.

  Orville watched the Pappa Bear of the family laughing and waving his arms around and sounding as if he were singing the Aria to the Bufala Mozzarella when suddenly the sound stopped, and he started waving his arms in toward his chest—at first frantically and soon dyingly. He was choking. His eyes started to bulge. People started to scream. Someone pounded him on the back. No luck. The pounding, Orville knew, merely sealed the mozzarella more tightly in the trachea. Orville and Celestina rushed over, she clearing a path and shouting over the chaos that he was a doctor.

  Panic in others provoked calm in Orville. He had even come to enjoy the way time slowed at such moments, like before a car crash. It almost makes you believe in eternity, he thought. Even more calm for the rosy glow of the Chianti, he grabbed the bulky Pappa for a Heimlich maneuver. Barely getting his arms around him, fist over diaphragm, he pushed. Niente. Again. Niente. Orville stuck his finger in the man’s mouth, fishing the pharynx for food. Nope. The man was slumping, turning blue, no longer gesturing.

  “A straw!” he called out to Celestina. “Tell them to get me a straw.”

  “Cannuccia!” she shouted to a waiter. “Per favore una cannuccia!”

  Lying the man down on a table, he took out his Swiss Army knife and opened the fine blade. The anatomy clicked in. His fingers started at the chin and walked down the tracheal rings over the Adam’s apple to the cricohyoid cartilage and down another notch—otherwise, he knew, you hit bad shit like the parathyroids and the tracheael artery. Holding a napkin to either side, he popped the knife edge into the trachea. Bright-red blood spurted out. Over his shoulder there was the sound of someone vomiting. He felt a whoosh of steamy air from the lungs.

  “Cannuccia!” he sang out like a tough surgeon making his grand entrance, announcing the Aria to the Hopefully Plastic Straw. He held out his hand for it, as if for a scalpel. Celestina handed it to him. It was plastic, not paper. Bene. Orville rotated the knife point against the ring of tracheal cartilage until, as when you carve down through the turkey leg-joint and feel the gristle give, the aperture widened enough to insert the straw. Immediately the air whistled in and out through the clear plastic and the fat guy went pink and tried to talk but couldn’t, because no air could get above to his vocal cords, still paralyzed by the gob of bufala mozzarella shipped fresh all the way from Napoli. Some lucky Italian doc, he mused, cutting the straw to size and taping it in place, will have the tricky job of coaxing the cheese back up from above.

  Pappa Bear again started waving his arms around comically, a sure sign of resurrection. There were bravos and thrown kisses, and, as they waited for the vaporetto, Chianti and mozzarella all around.

  Celestina and Orville sped back to the mainland with the smiling Pappa, helped the snappily uniformed ambulance attendants stuff the fat man into one of those thin ambulances, and then floated hand in hand up the hill to their hotel. At the door, as he put his arm around her, Orville was surprised to find Celestina trembling.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Now that I predicted it, it scares me.” She turned to face him, her eyes alive with fear. “It can come at any moment, that tap on the shoulder. Especially, my dear one, at the moment of great love.”

  “Well, we’re safe now, for the day.”

  “Not yet. That was just the first.”

  “Beginner’s luck.”

  At the desk was a telegram for Orville from his sister.

  MOTHER DIED TODAY AUG 1 TRIED TO CALL YOU

  FUNERAL AUG 3 TO GIVE YOU TIME TO COME HOME

  CALL COLLECT LOVE PENNY

  He felt the shock. The blood drained out. He sat down.

  Celestina stared at him.

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh God!” she said, crossing herself.

  Orville saw his shock mirrored in her eyes. “Yeah. God.”

  Celestina knelt down to him, cradling his head between her palms. “I am with you, dearest. I am with you.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, thanks. . . .” With a sinking feeling Orville realized that the telegram must have arrived at the sports center in Holland late on August the first, almost two weeks ago. “Shit. What the hell do I do now?”

  “Breathe,” she said. “I love you and I am here. Find the breath.”

  · 2 ·

  “Columbia! Next stop Columbia!”

  It was late the next afternoon. With an iron inevitability, the Hudson Highlander, northbound out of Grand Central Station, was veering from a trestle out over the Hudson River back onto land. Orville glanced out the right-hand window. At the top of a hill he saw Olana, the Persian-turreted mansion built by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederick Church. Its limestone face was a creamy gold against the lowering sun, and he felt the bite of nostalgia. Grabbing his backpack from the overhead rack, he walked to the space between the cars. He would be home in a couple of minutes.

  No, he would not. The train screeched, slowed, re-screeched with a lot more oomph, shuddered, and fought itself to a stop.

  Orville and the other passengers waited. No information was forthcoming. The air-conditioning clicked off. Figures, Orville thought, I come 4,000 miles from Orta to Milan to Zurich to Kennedy to Grand Central and then up the Hudson 128 miles—a whole day’s journey—and as soon as we poke up into the southern tip of this shit hole of a town, things break.

  Columbia, he knew all too well, was a town of breakage. At public events things would unerringly break. School microphones would consistently give out just after someone said, “Testing, testing.” On Memorial Days in Columbian cemeteries, just as the Gettysburg began, viewing stands would collapse. In deep summer at public tennis courts, water fountains were always going dry so that if, after a hot game of tennis on the asphalt courts, when your feet felt like grill-side-down burgers and your tongue like a bun, you went to the water fountain and turned the handle, the one thing you could be sure would not come out was water. Columbians learned to talk affectionately about past breakages, such as “the Great Breakage of ’37,” when, in the Thanksgiving Day parade a massive five-axle Universal Atlas cement truck disguised as a turkey exploded in front of the Niagara Mohawk power station, knocking out lights and heat for weeks. Or “the Dinosaur Breakage of ’52,” when the Paul Jonas life-sized sculpture of the brontosaurus bound for the New York World’s Fair broke the back of its barge and sank, its neck poking up out of the Hudson River in the most lifelike way.

  After another fifteen minutes Orville had had enough of the sweltering Amtrak car. Figuring it was only a mile or so to town, he decided to walk. He opened the door and jumped down from the car. The wet heat smacked him in the face like a big sweaty hand. Shouldering his backpack, he walked along the cinders to the front of the train. There were two tracks.

  “Hey pal, you can’t do that,” said the engineer. “It’s illegal.”

  “So sue me. Ciao.” He walked away a few steps before being jolted by a tremendous blast—the engineer had blown his horn. Orville picked up an empty can of Budweiser and threw it. It hit the engine with a pitiful plink, and he walked on.

  Feeling good out in the unconditioned world, his Nikes striking the cross ties with soft, firm thunks, Orville stretched his arms out to the dome of sky and let his eyes skate the innermost layer from the light blue at its apex, west along its thickening blue to where it met the light-purple cutouts that, so high that at first he thought them clouds, as his eyes followed their smooth undulations north toward Albany and south toward Rhinebeck, he realized were the peaks of the Catskills. Taking a deep breath, he let his eyes ease down the slopes of the mountains through the green, shadowed foothills to the inlet at Catskill Creek with its oil tanks and red neon sign for Mike’s Pizza and to the river itself, at eye level all silvery, tidal even a hundred miles north of its mouth, running
hard in its straight glacial trough to the sea.

  He passed under the mile-long Rip Van Winkle Bridge, its belly arched and ribbed like the roof of a yawning cat’s mouth. Orville had worked summers as a toll collector up there, the graveyard shift from midnight to eight so that he could play golf during the day and read all night long. Looking down into cars in those dark hours, he learned a lot about life, like what goes on in cars and how short the night really is.

  He heard a whistle, a train coming toward him, southbound from Columbia. He moved off the inside track to the track next to the river and watched it approach. The engineer was waving at him in what at first seemed a greeting, but as the train screamed past he realized it was a warning. He jerked around. The northbound train he’d just left was bearing down on him, its own whistle masked by the other’s. Orville jumped feet first into the river. The train thundered past, shrieking like a lunatic.

  Orville found his footing in the rocky shallows, feeling the beats of hot air on his face. The train whistles echoed back off the mountains. He looked down, seeing in an oily slick around his knees the inevitable river plastic: a Valvoline bottle and a Tampax applicator. His elbow was skinned and bleeding. He was sore but okay. As he hauled himself up onto the tracks, he caught the acrid scent of creosote.

  Creosote. The harsh scent stunned him. All at once he saw himself as a six-year-old, one summer’s day, lying on his back in a neglected grassy field down the street from his house on Ten Broek Lane. The scent of creosote was strong from the railroad tracks running nearby. Alone, he stared up at the clouds passing across the sky and suddenly had the sense that the world as he was seeing it was only a part of something else. For the first time in his life he saw himself as part of some whole, some whole world to which his own being was seamlessly connected. He felt lighter, more alive, as if something else had clicked on—or in. He leapt to his feet, making his fat legs go as fast as they could, and ran home to tell his mother. He burst into the kitchen and blurted out his discovery as the screen door slammed—bam!—behind him.