by Meg Howrey
“Will you let him tell the story,” Aurora asks, “before you rewrite it?”
“I was only a little high,” Luke says. “Anyway, so I stayed after people left.”
“Hey, are you going to tell Sara about Luke getting stoned?” Pearl interrupts, half sitting up to face Aurora. “Because I so appreciate your telling Sara about me, by the way. That was just a beautiful conversation.”
“Oh please, you practically told her yourself. I’m surprised you didn’t light up during dinner.” Aurora sends Cinnamon hurtling to her sister, who neatly catches him by one paw.
“I’m not even smoking anymore, you Judas. And did we not just hear how you can get a prescription for it in more enlightened States? I was waiting tables all summer! I wasn’t researching for the Queen of Equity Feminism and freakin’ networking lesbians in the Hamptons.”
“ ‘Feminist’ and ‘lesbian’ are not synonymous.”
“No, lesbians are less irritating.”
“Oh, so now you’re not a feminist?”
“Of course I’m a feminist. Oh, look at Cinnamon’s nose.”
“Poor thing.”
“Nana will fix it.”
“Why do I still love him so much?”
“I know what you mean,” Pearl says, bringing Cinnamon down to her face in order to kiss his nose.
“Anyway, Luke, go on.”
“Yeah, so I ended up staying, at Leila’s house, after everybody left.”
“And …”
“Well,” Luke says. “How shall I say this?”
Pearl sits up.
“Did you …?”
Luke nods.
“Luke!”
Aurora sits up now too.
“Okay, tell us everything,” Pearl says. “Don’t leave anything out.”
“Ugh, Pearl! Luke, tell us whatever you feel comfortable with.”
“Hey, I told you everything about my first time. Both of you.”
“From which we are still recovering,” Aurora says.
“And you didn’t tell everything,” Luke says. “You were more flowery about it.”
“Oh please, when have I ever been flowery?”
“You didn’t give anatomical details.”
“I don’t want to know who did what,” Pearl says. “Well, I kind of want to know but I don’t want to picture it. Anyway, you are horrible at describing things. Okay. Let’s ask questions.”
Luke crosses his legs and waits.
“Who initiated it?” Pearl asks.
“It was a mutual thing,” Luke says. “I think.”
“Why her?” Aurora asks. “I mean, were you just seizing the opportunity or was there some special quality to the whole thing or you felt this intense connection?”
“It just happened naturally,” Luke says, thinking. “There wasn’t this big buildup or anything. We were in the hot tub—”
“Of course,” Pearl says. “Of course you were in the hot tub.”
“I wasn’t sure how far things were going to go. She actually … she asked me to keep my eyes closed.”
“Wait,” Aurora says. “She asked you to keep your eyes closed? The whole time?”
“Um, yeah,” Luke says. “That’s what she wanted.”
“Why?” Aurora asks. “Did you ask why?”
“She said she doesn’t like to be looked at.”
“Okay, whoa,” Pearl says. “What?”
“She’s a little unusual,” Luke says. “That’s what I like about her.”
“She gets you to her house,” Pearl says, recapping. “And she gets you stoned with her fancy friends, and then everybody disappears and she lures you into her hot tub and makes you have sex with her with your eyes closed?”
“It wasn’t freaky,” Luke says. “It really wasn’t. There was no luring. And we didn’t do it in the hot tub. She has these cabana things by her pool. With futons.”
“What was she hiding, is the thing I want to know. Like some weird rash or something?”
“There wasn’t anything weird.”
“How would you know, your eyes were shut.”
“I was touching her.”
“It’s something else,” Aurora says. “It’s something psychological. It’s about control, maybe. Or shame.”
Luke had wanted to tell his sisters about Leila in order to keep her real, and in the present tense. He does not want to have to revise his memories now with things like shame or control.
“So what happened after?” Aurora prompts. “How did you leave things?”
“She left for London,” Luke says. “The next day. I texted her, she texted me. We’re texting.”
“What did you say?” Pearl asks. “In this text.”
“I could tell you were beautiful even with my eyes closed,” is what Luke had texted Leila. A phrase that had felt really right at the time, and then increasingly wrong during the four days where Leila had not replied, and then right again when he got the umbrella text.
“I told her she was beautiful.”
Aurora and Pearl smile.
“It really wasn’t weird.”
“So,” Aurora says, “here’s the thing, Luke. Sex is totally different for girls. It takes forever for girls to even have a proper orgasm, usually. And so that means there’s always an emotional component for girls. Because the pleasure part isn’t even totally there.”
“Most girls have sex so guys will like them,” Pearl says.
“You’ve told me all this,” Luke says. “A million times. Believe me, I was just happy that I could do it without the thought of you two standing over me screaming, ‘It’s different for her! It’s different for her!’ ”
“So what are you going to do?” Pearl insists, once she and Aurora have stopped laughing.
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just going with the flow.”
Pearl and Aurora groan.
“You’ve got to assert yourself, Luke,” Pearl says. “Otherwise you are going to be doomed to a series of ambiguous relationships with crazy girls who look down on you for being so nice and don’t appreciate you.”
“Like all of Pearl’s boyfriends,” Aurora says. “I’m sorry. I mean: slaves.”
“Yes, like all of my poor slaves.”
“Okay.” Luke stands up. “I’m never telling either of you any of my personal business again.”
Aurora and Pearl tackle Luke. Luke is forced to repeat, “I embrace the mystery of women,” and “I will not fall for psychos.” Also, “Pearl is an unqualified genius.”
Later, in his own bed, Luke curls himself around one of his pillows, imagining it is Leila, the one who does not need to be explained to anyone. Luke waits for sleep, for dreams, for a form of consciousness with no responsibility, for images, desires, connections that do not need to be justified with the rest of his mental life. Asleep, Luke can already be in college, be back in Los Angeles, can have had Mark with him from the very beginning.
Luke thinks, while he is waiting for this state, of Aurora saying, “Poor Sara.” Luke knows he has been punishing Sara since he has been home in various small ways, although he does not articulate the reasons why to himself. Instead, he decides that tomorrow he will be a very good son, the kind of person Sara raised him to be, and tell Sara that she should think about her own happiness. After all, a Sara fully engaged in her own happiness will be the one most likely to let Luke go to Los Angeles for New Year’s. A happy Sara doesn’t need him as much as Mark does.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Luke oversleeps. When he wakes up he’s not sure where he is, the pillow that was Leila is on the floor, and his alarm clock says 10:21. He bolts out of bed. The house is silent. He pulls on a pair of sweatpants and moves down the hallway, bumping off the walls. He checks his sisters’ room—empty—pit-stops in the bathroom, then continues down the stairs to the kitchen. Sara is at the counter, cutting up fruit.
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
“G’morning. Where is everybody?”
; “Nana’s at Assembly. The girls took Aunt Nancy to the Amish Market. We all thought we’d let you sleep. I heard you and your sisters giggling till all hours last night.”
“Whuh.”
“You were tired. Nana understood. Have some fruit.”
Luke takes a peach.
“I had an idea this morning, and if you’re up for it, I thought maybe we could do a meditation together,” Sara says. Luke remembers his intention of being a good son today.
“Sure, just let me wake up a little?”
Sara hands Luke a mug of tea.
“Come up to the attic when you’re ready.”
Luke eats his peach. His quads are a little sore. He eats two bran muffins and a banana, goes back up the stairs, stops at the bathroom again, splashes water on his face, brushes his teeth. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, noting that his reflection is different in this mirror than in the one in his bathroom in LA, although his face has not changed. Luke leans closer to the mirror, then farther away. He bares his teeth at himself, tries smiling. Sighing, he leaves the bathroom.
Sara has lit candles and set up two of her meditation pillows on the floor. She is already seated at one, legs folded in full lotus pose, palms facing up on her knees. Luke takes the same pose, yawning a little.
“Thank you for doing this with me,” Sara says.
“I’m a little out of practice,” Luke says.
It’s almost eight in the morning in LA. Luke thinks his father might be at the gym. Or walking Humphrey.
“I thought we might do a mandala meditation,” Sara says in her low tone. “Just spend a few moments clearing a space in front of you.”
Luke feels a slight twinge in his neck. Sara continues talking, and Luke ignores a desire to rub his neck, scratch his knee. After a bit, he is able to conceptualize an empty space in front of him.
“Let that space become a square. See the edges of the square, and the empty space it contains.”
Luke decides he needs a bigger square. He remembers the Rothko paintings, debates the desirability of a rectangle over a square. Settles on a square.
“Put yourself in the center of the square,” Sara is saying. “You are the center of this universe. All else radiates from you. Choose an image for yourself: a perfect circle, or a triangle, or a sun, or a star. Anything you want.”
Luke selects and discards the suggested shapes before settling on the image of a single cell.
The standard method for drawing neurons is to draw them left to right: first the cell itself, the axon cable running west, the dendritic spines branching off of it. Wrapping around the axon are glial cells, which form a myelin sheath, an insulation cover to help speed up electrical charges along the axon. Myelin sheaths are not present when we are born, we develop them, and they help us learn language and regulate our behavior. For Luke the finest moment so far in his formal education was the day he was told that these neurons, and dendrites, and axons—how many we have, how they interact, how they deal with our environment—are what make us different as individuals. Sara is still talking, but Luke ignores her because he is repeating the words “myelin sheath” to himself, with great satisfaction.
Reluctantly, he tunes back into Sara. She is instructing Luke to think about the events of the summer, and his emotions, and form them into symbols. Luke listens to this, and tries to remember what the little pipe devices that monks use to shake sand into mandalas are called.
“When you become distracted by other thoughts, acknowledge them gently, and let them go,” Sara says. “Focus on the images you are creating in your mandala.”
Luke, concentrating, adds another cell in the center next to his own. He imagines some silver mammoth tusks, a series of Braille-like dots, in purple. Gold arrows, pointing upwards.
“Chakpur,” he thinks, happily. “That’s what they are called. Those little pipes.”
That settled, Luke becomes slightly more interested in his mandala. He puts in satellite bursts, canyons, green squares, waves, a red carpet.
“Nothing is unimportant,” Sara says. “Everything is central, and unique.”
Luke swivels his mandala in his mind, mapping it from new angles, memorizing it. For a second, his square elongates into a rectangle, then back to a square. “What a trip,” he hears Mark say.
“Experience the image in its entirety,” Sara says.
Luke wishes Sara would stop talking, actually.
Luke admires his mandala.
He adds sequoia trees. Sara keeps talking.
“And now, begin to detach yourself from its design and observe it quietly.”
“Wait, detachment already?” Luke thinks, annoyed because he is not finished creating. He puts a Joshua tree in each corner of the mandala, for symmetry.
“Observe the pattern and your place in it.”
Luke tosses in some dancing leprechauns, tries hard not to think about Leila.
“Observe.”
“I could do an essay about symbols,” he thinks.
“Observe.”
Luke begins composing an essay: “The act of observation affects the outcome of an event. Total objectivity is impossible.”
“Detach your emotions from your symbols. Let them exist in their own reality.”
Luke gets stuck inside this thought. What reality could these symbols inhabit, without him? And emotions inside symbols? That wasn’t real. At some point the meaning of an arrow was agreed upon, but an arrow by itself was nothing. It was lines.
Occasionally, in meditation, Luke will get a little claustrophobic. That is happening now.
“When you’re ready, Luke, reach out your hand in front of you.”
Luke knows in a moment Sara is going to ask him to destroy his mandala. Because that is what you do with mandalas. Luke feels a little nauseous.
“Reach out your hand,” Sara says. “And gently, and with compassion and love, sweep it all away.”
The moment she says “sweep,” Luke opens his eyes. Sara has her eyes shut and is leaning forward, swaying slightly.
“Sweep your hand across it,” she says. “Let it all go from you. Sweep until there is nothing left but that pure and empty space. Sweep the space and release yourself from it.” Sara’s own hand reaches out, wiping the air before her. Luke decides that enough is enough.
“Hold on a sec,” he says.
Sara jerks upright, opening her eyes.
“Why,” Luke asks, “are we doing this?”
Sara’s mouth opens a little.
“Maybe,” Luke tells her, “I don’t want to erase anything. Maybe I’m not ready for that.”
“Okay,” Sara says, nodding. “Okay. Talk to me about that.”
“You talk to me.” Luke stands up. There is a buzzing feeling occurring in his sinuses. “You talk to me about why it’s so important for you that I let it all go. It’s my mandala. My summer. My father. You can’t make it all go away with a meditation and some candles.”
Luke is not really certain of the words coming out of his mouth, but they seem to be still coming.
“If you have something to say to me, just say it,” he says. “Don’t make it into some Buddhist visualization. I’m not a Buddhist. You’re not a Buddhist. Why are we doing this?”
Luke stands up and walks out of the room, moving quickly down the stairs. He is not sure of where he would like to go next. He goes to his room. He is, he finds, experiencing some sort of adrenaline rush, and his hands are shaking. When he hears Sara’s footsteps coming down the hallway after him, he knows that there will now probably be a fight of some kind. But he decides he will not fight with Sara. He will listen to whatever Sara wants to say, and he will manage it. He walked away from her guided meditation and that was exciting, and a little dramatic, but not really necessary. It was the kind of thing Pearl would do. Luke knows that in a few minutes he will calm Sara down, and it will all be over.
Luke turns to the doorway just as Sara enters his room.
“You want to t
alk?” Sara demands. “Or do you want to walk away from me?”
Sara shakes something at him: the magazine with his father’s picture on the cover.
“Is that what this is about? That interview?” Luke almost laughs. “Rory said you wouldn’t take it personally. She said—”
“This is not,” Sara says firmly, “about me. This is about you, Luke.”
“Really?” Luke folds his arms. “Really? ’Cause I think it’s about him. Actually.” Luke knows that challenging Sara will not calm Sara down, but he can’t help himself. Now that he has said that, Luke thinks, he will start calming Sara down.
“Well, let’s talk about him, then.” Sara tosses the magazine on Luke’s bed. “And how he’s had you participating in all of his … whatever. Going on television. And talking about my son all over the place. Taking you to baseball games and parties. And dressing you up, giving you a new expensive thing every time you turn around—”
“Okay, dressing me up? That’s crazy. So he took me to a baseball game. That’s hardly corruption. He wanted me to have a good time!”
“Yes.” Sara’s voice races up an incline. “In front of as many people as possible.”
“Okay, you don’t know what you are talking about.” Luke shakes his head. His voice has an unfamiliar pitch. He hadn’t known he could make this sound. “It wasn’t like that AT ALL. He didn’t buy me. It wasn’t a STUNT.”
“I don’t know what it was.” Sara points at the magazine. “But nobody asked me about this! And now people are coming up to me, in grocery stores, and in my own studio, asking me about my private life.”
“Oh, so that’s it.” Luke kicks the bed lightly, just below the magazine. “That’s what you’re worried about? What happened to not caring about what people thought? Are you ticked off because a magazine didn’t list all of your healing arts?”
“That is NOT what I am talking about—”
“Or because it says you weren’t married? You weren’t married! You didn’t even know him!” Luke believes this is a very reasonable point, but maybe he should lower his voice now, because things are starting to get out of hand.
