Pagan Heaven

by Ruth Rouff

  It was awkward. Still, we continued to see each other. That summer, we decided to take an Olivia Cruise of Alaska. For those of you who don’t know, Olivia is a tour company for lesbians. The whole ship would be lesbians, except, of course, for the crew. Connie graciously offered to pay for half of my fare. Since she was making much bigger bucks than I was, how could I refuse?

  There’s nothing like breaking up on a cruise ship. It’s not as if one can go anywhere. The ship sailed from Vancouver, Canada. The crunch came our first night out of harbor. We both got drunk, Connie more so than I.

  That night, when we were in bed, Connie said, “This is awful.” I had tried to reciprocate her passion, but it was clear to Connie that my heart just wasn’t in it. By the way, anyone who thinks that lesbian sex is by nature hot is living in a dream world. It can be just as dull as hetero sex, if not duller. Ever heard of lesbian bed death? That occurred pretty quickly in my relationship with Connie.

  Connie was by now very angry with me. I was messing up her romantic vacation. I should have told her earlier that I just wasn’t all that into her physically. But I liked her company. I liked her warmth. I was afraid of being alone again.

  Seeing all this beautiful scenery in the company of a person who doesn’t want to be around you is a bittersweet experience—more bitter than sweet, actually. I knew that Connie resented me. She began giving me the cold shoulder. Still, she tried to make the most of the trip. We saw the totem pole village outside of Juneau. Connie developed a cold, so I did the tour of Skagway—the gold rush town—alone. There were lots of little shacks there, lining a lane. The woman who conducted the walking tour said that they had been used by prostitutes for quickies. Prostitution was a big thing in gold rush camps. We learned that the miners paid the whores in golden nuggets.

  A day later, Connie and I went on a whale watching excursion together. We saw plenty of whales—blowing out water and breeching in spectacular fashion. We also saw some eagles, swooping above the deep blue water and alighting on the pine trees that lined the shore. I was torn between feeling awe for the breathtaking scenery and the whales and embarrassment at being in the company of someone who thought I was a jerk.

  The next day, we took a bird-watching hike in Sitka. Since it was raining, we didn’t see many birds—just a few kingfishers. But we did see a lot of salmon that had been half-eaten by bears. Evidently bears are sloppy eaters. Then we took the train ride to Anchorage and endured the long flight back to Houston and then Philly. Connie had her iPod in her ear, so she didn’t have to talk to me very much. I tried to keep busy reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. After getting the rental car at the Philly airport, Connie dumped me at my house like a sack of potatoes. Then she headed off to the Holiday Inn. She had to be at work the next day. I knew I had deeply disappointed her. She certainly deserved more than my lukewarm ass.

  It’s hard to disappoint a nice person. I knew that my therapist meant well in advising me to become involved with someone who was emotionally available. But one can’t fake desire. On the basis of my awful Alaskan vacation, I resolved never to become involved with someone to whom I wasn’t passionately attracted. But I broke that resolution fairly quickly when I met another Texan named Dawn.

  As for Connie, she and I stayed in touch long enough for her to tell me she went on another Olivia cruise and thoroughly enjoyed herself. This time she went alone.

  Ten White Russians

  I was standing near the dance floor at Sisters Nightclub with my friend Donna, gazing at women who were presumably having a good time. Although Donna was straight, she sometimes accompanied me to the club. She was my closest friend.

  “I like dancing where men won’t hit on you,” Donna liked to say. That was her rationale for accompanying me to lesbian bars. Except for sexuality, we had a lot in common. We were both feminists, for one thing. Donna, in particular, couldn’t stand aggressive men. She had once had a bad experience with an aggressive man. In fact, she told me that she had been raped while she was living in Los Angeles.

  “It was a guy who was a friend of my roommate. He pulled a gun on me one day when no one else was around,” she said.

  “That must have been awful!” I cried. “Did you press charges?”

  “No,” Donna said. “I probably should have, but I just couldn’t go through all that.”

  It must have been traumatizing, but at the moment Donna told me, she didn’t seem particularly broken up by it. Then again, she wasn’t the type to go on and on about her emotions. Well, she was now in therapy, so maybe that was helping.

  We watched the throng of women gyrate on Sisters’ dance floor. It was chill and dark and, from my point of view, perpetually disappointing. With the pulsating dance music, it was like a cold, smoky womb. I almost never met women in clubs. I was shy and intellectual—not a good combination in the club world.

  I noticed that Donna was really knocking them down. Her drink was White Russians. Since we had arrived, she had had several of the sweet, milky drinks. We had sat for a while at the downstairs bar before heading upstairs.

  “Let’s dance!” Donna had cried after about half an hour of that. You had to hand it to her—she had plenty of energy. Sometimes I thought she liked Sisters more than I did. After we walked upstairs, she placed her large pocketbook in one corner of the dance floor, and we swayed to the sound of “Like a Prayer.” It was like we were two planets in different orbits. It wasn’t erotic at all, but it was better than staying at home, for both of us.

  Donna had broken up with her boyfriend Joe about a year earlier. That had been a mess. I had visited them on election night 1992, thinking that after twelve years of Republican rule it would be fun to celebrate Bill Clinton’s election with friends. However, when I walked in the door of their apartment, the tension between the two hit me like a wave. At this point in their relationship, Donna kept watching and hectoring Joe. She got this way at times. Any little innocuous thing you said, she would jump on, like a vulture on road kill.

  “It’s a nice day today,” you could say, and she’d read something into it.

  “What did you say?” she’d ask, her green eyes lit with an unearthly gleam. “What do you mean by that?”

  I’d try to explain that I meant nothing by it, but even that was difficult to do. She’d question your statement that you meant nothing, so you couldn’t win.

  That night we watched the election returns roll in. As we sat waiting for Clinton to address the crowd, Donna remembered that she was out of cereal and sent Joe to the Acme to get some. Then, when he was there, she called the store to page him to tell him to get something else. This was before cell phones became commonplace. That’s something I would never do to anyone—have him or her paged over a supermarket loudspeaker. Whatever the hell she wanted him to pick up—mustard, celery, crackers—could wait.

  “Donna could aggravate Jesus Christ off the Cross,” Donna’s mom had once told me. I had to reluctantly agree this was true. Yet I appreciated Donna’s wit. She told me that her mom had dropped out of Villanova after her dad graduated so that she could marry him and set up house.

  “All Mom got from Villanova was her MRS. degree,” Donna cracked.

  When Joe came home from the Acme, he looked grim and put-upon.

  “Did you get the mustard?” Donna asked him.

  “Yes,” he said as he placed the bag of groceries on the kitchen table.

  “Did you get the Special K?”

  “I told you I would,” said Joe.

  Tiring of the tense atmosphere, I made up some excuse and left a few minutes later. I never did see Bill Clinton address the crowd in Little Rock.

  “Damn,” I thought as I was walking to my car, “a Democrat finally gets elected president, and I spend the evening in the company of those two.” I felt cheated. Who knew how long it would be before we once again had cause to celebrate?

  Soon afterward, Donna began calling me and complaining that people were breaking in
to their apartment and moving things around.

  A little while later, my jeweler friend Karen, who was Joe’s coworker at Crosby Jewelers, and the woman who had introduced me to Donna, told me that Joe was ready to move out of the apartment.

  “Donna was threatening him,” Karen told me over the phone.

  “What?!”

  “Yes, threatening.” Karen sighed. “I feel guilty that I introduced them.”

  At this point you might wonder why I had Donna as a friend. Her behavior was obviously crazy. As I later learned, believing that people are entering your home when you’re not there is a common delusion among schizophrenics. Yet, the truth is that Donna could be a wonderful companion. At her best she was effervescent. We had a great time watching movies together. It seems a simple thing to have a friend to do that with, but if you’re gay it’s not that easy. For one thing, I’ve never lived in a community where gay women are abundant. Frankly, there aren’t many places like that in the world. Secondly, I found that many straight women were either freaked out by lesbians or else they tried to seduce them. They weren’t really interested in a relationship; they just wanted to see if they could. Donna wasn’t freaked out by me, nor did she try to seduce me. She appreciated gay people, in part because her older brother Jimmy had been gay.

  “My parents found a love letter that a guy had written to Jimmy,” Donna told me soon after we had first met, at a Buddhist meeting. “My dad was furious!” Furious, over someone’s sexuality! Well, her parents had met at a Catholic university.

  Donna adored Jimmy. She told me how handsome he was.

  “Jimmy lived for a while in New York and met Arthur Laurents,” Donna told me.

  “Who’s Arthur Laurents?” I asked.

  “He wrote the book for West Side Story.”

  I envisioned Jimmy leading the high life in Manhattan, a gorgeous young gay man amidst the artistic elite.

  But Donna never could catch a break: beloved Jimmy died of AIDS in the early nineties. Donna didn’t talk much about him after that, and I never saw her distraught. However, his death must have been heart-wrenching for her.

  After we stopped dancing, she went to the ladies’ room. When she came out, she went over to the bar and ordered another White Russian. I was just finishing off my first beer. I marveled at her capacity. She started chatting with a couple of flannel-clad women who were standing near us. She was far more outgoing than I. As Donna chatted with the two women, I became emboldened and walked up to a woman who had been standing by the dance floor.

  “Want to dance?” I shouted over the music.

  The woman, a stocky brunette with short hair, nodded, and we danced to “Love Shack.”

  But I noticed her eyes shifting around the dance floor. When the song ended, we thanked each other and went our separate ways.

  Donna went to the bar and returned with another White Russian.

  We danced a bit more and then Donna had another drink.

  I danced with another woman. The night wore on. Time slides by in dance clubs. The beat becomes hypnotic.

  “How many drinks have you had, Donna?” I asked her.

  “Ten,” she said, smiling. By now her eyes were gleaming like neon signs.

  “Ten!” I would have been on the floor after three. But Donna was strange that way. She seemed immune to the effects of alcohol consumption. It was as if her stomach was disconnected from her brain.

  Well, it didn’t matter that much. I was driving, and I had had two lite beers.

  I worried about Donna, though. Sometimes her lips moved and no words came out.

  “I used to hear voices,” she once told me, quite casually, as we were driving down Route 70 in Plum Hill. She could have been describing any other mundane thing that people do, such as shopping at a particular store or having a certain job. I used to hear voices.

  “Do you still hear them?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. But I think she still did. I suspected she was talking to the voices in her head, having a regular back and forth with them. I was appalled. This was some heavy-duty shit.

  “Are you still chanting?” I asked her. As a Nichiren Buddhist, I chant for roughly an hour a day. It centers me. I thought that chanting might lessen any voices that Donna might be hearing.

  “No,” she said. “That only makes me worse.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to help Donna, but there didn’t seem to be a way. She was already seeing a therapist, and she refused to admit that she was now hearing voices. I wondered if she was on medication, but I was afraid to ask her.

  Sometimes I berated myself for having a best friend who was obviously crazy. What did that say about me? That I felt most at home around nutty people? But Donna wasn’t just crazy. Sometimes she said wise things. One evening I was ragging about my older brother Steve and the fact that he was still smoking. Donna sighed and said, “You did your best to get him to quit. You just have to accept people for what they are.” She also told me that I was wasting my time mooning over some woman I worked with.

  “Ruth, you’re like that Leslie Howard character in Of Human Bondage!” she once told me. “He had a club foot, and he was nuts over some trampy woman who was way beneath him.”

  Although it hurt to hear this, I had to acknowledge that Donna was dead right about my infatuation with my co-worker Jeannie. I had to face the fact that Jeannie just wasn’t that into me. She never had been and never would be.

  About three years after the trip to Sisters, Donna’s husband Nick called me on the phone. He and Donna had been married only a couple of years. They had met at the office where they both worked. Donna had introduced me to Nick, and I had thought he was a nice, cute guy. The thought had occurred to me to warn him about Donna, but there was no way I could have done that. Besides, her symptoms were in abeyance, and she seemed so happy.

  “What’s up?” I asked him now. I was surprised he was calling me. He never called me; Donna did.

  “What’s up?” repeated Nick, as if subtly mocking my casual tone. “Donna is dead,” he said.

  I felt the ground sway beneath me. I sat down on my bed, which was next to the phone.

  “I got home from work and found her dead on the bathroom floor,” Nick continued. He went on to tell me that Donna had been bulimic and had also been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

  “I never realized she was bulimic!”

  “Well, I couldn’t miss it, living with her,” Nick replied. He told me that she had been going to the county mental health clinic for treatment, but they hadn’t done much for her.

  I wasn’t surprised by their lack of success. It wasn’t like she had been going to a high priced private therapist. Yet I chided myself for missing the bulimia. We were best friends. What clues had I missed?

  I thought back to the night of the ten White Russians. Had Donna been puking them up in the bathroom? She didn’t look particularly thin. Then again, as I later learned, many bulimics are normal weight. Also, it was hard to gauge just how much she weighed because she often wore baggy sweaters. Since she and Nick had moved up to Jenkintown, I hadn’t seen her as much as I had when she was living in Collingswood. In fact, I hadn’t seen her in two months. She used to call me up a lot, though. In fact, in the month or so before she died, she would call me constantly, every evening.

  “Hi Ruth,” she’d say.

  “Hi Donna,” I’d reply. “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing much,” she’d say. Then she’d say, “Well, I just wanted to say hello. That’s all. Good-bye.”

  Then she’d call again fifteen minutes later and do the same thing. When I asked her why she kept calling me and to please stop, she wouldn’t give a reason, but would promise not to call me anymore. But then fifteen minutes later she’d do it again.

  I started not answering the phone.

  “Fuck!” I’d cry when the phone rang. I felt like tearing my hair out.

  I called Karen and told her what was happening.

&n
bsp; “Call the police on her,” Karen said. She said that, but I don’t think that’s what she would have done. Karen is a very compassionate Buddhist. I couldn’t call the police on Donna either, no matter that she was getting on my last nerve. She was my closest friend.

  “The coroner said she weighed seventy-five pounds,” said Nick. “He’s doing a blood test, but he thinks that her heart might have just stopped. That can happen with eating disorders.”

  I pictured Donna lying dead on the cold bathroom tiles. Maybe she had been vomiting when her heart stopped. It was all such a come down. I knew that she had had high expectations for her marriage and had truly loved Nick. I speculated that when even being happily married didn’t cure her demons, she went on a downhill slide.

  “Poor Donna,” I thought. I went to my Gohonzon and chanted for her.

  A few days later, Nick called to tell me that the blood test hadn’t revealed anything.

  “Someone from the mental health clinic called to find out if Donna was going to keep her next appointment,” he added. I can only imagine how he felt upon being asked that.

  I had one question for Nick. “Did you know that Donna had mental problems before you married her?”

  “Yes,” Nick said. But he married her anyway. That was Donna.

  Shortly after she died, I entered therapy. I felt that this was one “life event” I couldn’t handle on my own. When I told my therapist about Donna’s death, she said, in effect, that Donna had too many serious problems, and it was best that she had been released from this vale of tears.

  “We enter this world crying, while everyone around us is happy,” said my therapist. “We leave this world happy to be at peace, while everyone around us is crying.”

  What she said made sense. This life is no picnic for anyone. And as I looked back on Donna’s life, I realized that she had never, ever been at peace. Perhaps now she was.

  Three or four months before she died, Donna brought me a Chunky candy bar. I have no idea why. I hadn’t asked for it. She just breezed into my apartment one evening and said that she had bought one for herself and that she wanted me to have one, too. I wasn’t hungry, so I put the Chunky in my refrigerator and forgot about it.