by John Updike
Forgive me, you don't want to know any of this. This is my garbage and you have your own life. Somebody said to me the other day that at some point a woman must become her own mother. But it's hard when you still have one alive and well. That is amazing about the Visage buyout by Revlon, and your making all that scrumptious money! But now do put it in some safe securities—utilities pay the best dividends of-course and are not apt to go down unless the company over-commits to nuclear power—or CDs and don't listen to another word the admiral whispers into your ear. You were lucky. It seems to me that if the SEC were to investigate you could both go to jail for that tip and his son. too. How old is his son? Forget I asked, I'm not on the market, but I can tell you entre nous it's only a matter of time until I am disparue from this place. The only people left are those with nowhere else to go, or those who did attain near enough to vairagya and samadhi not to give a hoot about their surroundings. Almost all the stores in the mall are shut down, and the Karuna Pharmacy is under a heavy indictment from the narcs, and even the sweet little Sachchidananda River has dried up—I guess we were depleting the water table, with the irrigation and all the flush toilets people insisted on having. It used to be called Gritty Creek and now we can see why. Even the days have turned unfriendly—the sun is bright but not warm and the nights are viciously cold and somehow frighteningly enclosing, like being inside a black crystal or a cage of stars. So many stars!—an impossible dust of them that you never see in the misty polluted East.
If you and your voracious boyfriend are going to keep eating out at Polynesian, Mexican, and Cajun restaurants every night you shouldn't be surprised by an irritated duodenum or even diverticulitis. What you need is bran and raw iron-rich vegetables (dark-green leafy ones—not iceberg lettuce) and eggs in moderation, and to cut out all grease and fatty meats, except maybe liver once a week for the iron. Don't tailor your diet to the Admiral's—he is a man and has altogether different needs, since he has a prostate and you don't and you have smaller bones. Men can absorb much more calcium than women, and you should never drink milk for a pre-ulcerous condition—milk, it turns out, is rather bard to digest. Try Gelusil—Maalox somehow has a bad aura, a faint vibrating violet glow like those public toi: let seats that supposedly sterilize themselves. Please don't tease me about your marrying this sailor-boy—it would be much kinder to the heirs and save a lot of legal fees if you would just live in sin. Couldn't you find another condo, with an elevator and a peek at the sea? Or get used to the pool view from his, and ignore the rattle of the diving board and the sound early in the morning from the sprinklers? If you wouldn't wake up at four in the morning you wouldn't hear, the sprinklers. Have you ever tried wax earplugs? The best are made in Europe, Oropax—little fuzzy balls that go deli-ciously soft from your body heat—but Flent's from any old American drugstore might help you. Warm them in your hand before poking them in, otherwise you could break an ear drum. I'm sorry your know-it-all swain thinks the real-estate action is moving inland and that your place is depreciating. In Florida housing may be more like cars than in the North—new is best and almost-new is second-best and then it's all downhill. Also I suspect there's a subconscious pull away from the seaside now with the icecaps melting from these holes in the ozone. But what would the two of you do with a view of a golf course? Balls through the window, and electric carts being driven right through the yard. As I remember, you never liked men having fun by themselves. And think how you'd miss the little shops at the Palm Royal Plaza—you know you didn't like Del Mar Village near as well. We Price women need to see the sea. That was a rather funny cartoon from the Miami ^ Herald but men never wear those dots (tikkas) on their foreheads, and he never claimed to be a Brahmin, only an honest Shudra (the artisan caste).
Happy Thanksgiving, and even Merry Christmas. I don't know what will be happening to me. I have to confront the Arhat and do dread it. I waited twenty-two years to confront Charles and then it was by being out of the house when he came home from work.
Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder about Wa-tertown, etc. You were a good mother, given the vik-shipta (scatterbrained) style of your generation. I guess that's all any of us can do, follow the fashion and trust biology to override culture—if we try to be better parents than our peers, our children will feel uneasy. I mean, children aren't entirely the point of a woman's life, are they? But if not, what is5 Tell me if you've learned.
Addled love,
Sare
[tape]
Namaste, Master.
My little Kundalini has been avoiding me these past days.
These past days have brought many duties and distractions.
And disasters.
Disasters only to those who have not yet disengaged from prakriti. Whose vasanas still harbor phalatrishna.
That is well spoken. You are wearing Western dress. It has sharpened your tongue.
Now that it is almost December my saris seemed thin.
Your sweater indeed appears bulky. It conceals the shape of your beautiful breasts.
I blush to hear you call them beautiful. Only Buddha and his peace is beautiful.
Within bisp'eace there are a million million jewels. It is one of the priceless insights of Mahayana that particulars do not cease in nirvana. They are simply at last freed from disturbing motion. The wind of decay no longer caresses them.
As executive assistant, I have a number of sorrows to report, and one cause for joy.
I wish to bear the cause for joy. Let our lawyers deal with the sorrow. Sorrow is their trade.
The joy is that Melissa Blithedale, after months of meditation and growing disenchantment with the Presbyterian Church and her mirthless financial advisers, has experienced a change of heart. In our letter of late May she was told she would be welcome back here. Now she wants to come. And to secure your benevolence she not only offers to cease demanding return of the loan she made three years ago but wishes to kick in another five hundred K. What shall I tell her?
Tell her of course to come. Write and say, "Come, ineffable Melissa! Be no longer buffaloed!"
She will find the puram much diminished since her last stay. Then, I believe, she was thoroughly coddled.
We will coddle her again, the good Mrs. B. We will take her into our innermost councils, which since Durga V departure are underpopulated. We will bouse her in high style, in her choice of abandoned A-frames. She will find spiritual advantage in the many challenges. You have never met her, Ktindalini. Her ashram name is Mahima, which means "the power to swell to enormous size and touch the moon." She is quite short and squat, yet with a charm, a monied bounce. She has that sexual confidence of rich women. She is of.an old San Francisco family. You will enjoy her. She is amusing. You and she will speak the same language, that of the manner born.
I am not sure she and I will speak any language.
How is that, my most precious? No. Don't touch me yet.
As you wish, my nayika.
When I first came here, my leader in dynamic meditation kept shouting at me, "Who are you?" Now I ask the same question of you, Master. Who are you?
Who do you think I am?
I think you are my Master and love and my living path to Buddha.
[Silence.]
But now I have been told that you are not a holy man from India but a Jewish Armenian from Watertown, Massachusetts.
[Silence.]
Which is true, Master?
Wherein is the contradiction? Why may not a holy man come from Watertown? Why may not the living path begin there?
Perhaps there is no reason.
And yet you feel one. You feel deceived. Worse, you feel mocked.
Yes, I suppose.
Our tantric lovemaking, the highly successful technique of vajrolimudra, now seems a mockery, a loss of your dignity because behind the mask and accent of the guru a pair of Western eyes watched, and a brain thinking with a coarse American accent?
Something like that. Let me hear your real voice.
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I'm not sure I can still do it. Even my brain now, when it talks to itself, has the Arbat's voice.
When did this incredible imposture first occur to you?
I resent the word "imposture." I grew into it organically. It's a phase of my being, a karmic reality. In India I became Indian. I never applied for citizenship, but the rest of it—the diet, the clothes, the languages, the mind-set—just came and filled me in. But they didn't forget—the Indian authorities. They remembered, and when enough little embarrassments at Ellora bad piled up—injuries, bad trips, complaints from parents, complaints from neighbors—they kicked me out. The wogs deported me.
Why isn't this generally known?
I wasn't getting stateside publicity in those days. I was just one more guru obscuru. Coming to the States was Durga 's idea, and she was right: this is the place to score. This is the place where dubkba translates into money. Back in India, once I was gone, what did they care? To them, I was one more piece of foreign klisbta—as long as I left and the ashram dissolved, they were happy enough. Their dirty little secret was, our farm-bouse and its bit of land was where they were putting one of their cardboard-and-plaster bousing projects, with rakeojfsfor everybody. Our getting out quietly was pan of our price for not balking at their price. What you got to realize about India, it may be poor but it's a capitalist country. People are on the take. For peanuts by our standards, but on the take.
But how did you get into this country?
No problem. I bad my old passport. Dean Rusk bad signed it, that's Bow old it was. I went and got it renewed at the consulate in Bombay and walked through controls at Kennedy.
Welcome home, Mr. Steinmetz. I didn't even bother to put on a suit. Durga and Nitya andAlinga knew, but that was about it. Ma Prapti maybe, but I think not; otherwise she would have blabbed when she got to blabbing. Not everybody came in the same plane, remember. You stand in the fast line, they look up your number to see if you're on the feds' shit list, and bingo, if you 're not, you 're in. Once in, I'm the Arbat again.
But how did you become the Arhat in the first place?
The story of my life. O.K. I was born on Elton Avenue, of these two crazy mismatched people. There wasn't any religion around the bouse, my parents cancelled each other out. They must have had great sex, because nothing else showed. My mother was actually a kind of anti-Semite. She couldn 't stand my father's people, from over in the old West End, mostly. She thought they were pushy, greedy, slippery, and bad crucified Christ. And him and the Armenians—be called them barbarians, be called them gypsies. He'd say the Turks should have finished the job, she 'd say Hitler didn V have such a bad idea. I got nothing, 'growing up. No baptism, no bar mitzvab. My mother didn't even make cboeregsfor breakfast, she said my father could go out and buy himself bagels. People felt sorry for me. One of my mother's older sisters, Aunt Mariam, took me to church a few times at Easter and Christmas—to St. James locally and that new one they put up over on Brattle Street, right in Wasp country—but, Jesus, the services were endless, and all that incense and candle smoke did a job on my sinuses. Iwasone of those kids with tons of allergies. The desert here has been great for that, by the way. The same with you? I notice your nose runs a lot. O.K. Don't answer. Sulk. Make your guru squirm.
So: spiritually I grew up with nothing, just these ethnic slurs all the time and noises from the bedroom. But there was something—a blank little God I carried with me like a tiny teddy bear in my bead, this little curved shadow like a busk clinging to the underside of my brain. I mean, it was me, yet something more than me, something I could appeal to—and there wasn V just input, there was output. I was transmitting and receiving. I could feel it at night. But also in the day, in the middle of the afternoon, out on the schoolyard, this terrific joy, this gratitude that kept spilling and spilling out of me like thread when the sewing machine goes crazy. But it had no face or name; it bad no form. I was jealous and sore—my parents with their orthodox upbringings bad been given something, it was part of their energy, and the other kids in school bad been given the same sort of thing even if they took it for granted and didn V know diddledy-squat about it and even shut on it. The Catholic girls with the little gold crosses between their tits and the Jewish boys taking off a double set of holidays and even the Protestants, their faces would get a little stiff and guilty if the talk got too dirty—you could see some shadow coming from above, some message from way upstairs.
Well, not to make a sob story out of this, it got to be the late Fifties, the early Sixties. I read Alan Watts and Krisbnamurti and Salinger and Ginsberg. I read the Upanisbads and, right there, bit this terrific verse, where the King of Death says to Nacbiketa: "The Supreme Person, of the size of a thumb, the innermost Self, dwells forever in the bean of all beings." That was Him!—my old pal God, the size of a thumb, and with just that backwards curve, you know, that a thumb has. I was at Northeastern at the time, reading poli. set. and introductory psych., and a lot of other crap that was supposed to translate into some ass-kissing desk job at John Hancock or City Hall. Suddenly I was sick of competing with nerds. I could have been shipped to Vietnam but turned out to be 4-F—too asthmatic. I thanked old God and took off for India. Unlike a lot of the trash went there after the Beatles cruised Calcutta, I stuck. Whereas tbe imposture in that? 1 found peace, 1 gave peace. India made sense to me—Buddhism made sense to me—the way you can take as much or little as you want, the way even nothing is something. After fifteen years I was Indian. The people that came to that first ashram in Ellora—there on the edge of town, this falling-down tin-roofed lime-green bouse—were almost all of them Westerners. Why would they want to come to another Westerner? Subliminally, of course, what attracted them was that I was a Westerner—my vasanas spoke their language. I spoke to their hangups. But up front I bad to be strange—/ had to look like something else, afresh chance. So I gave myself an Indian childhood as a beggar boy in Bombay—what 5r the big deal? Maybe I once was a beggar in Bombay, a Sbudra gone to seed, and not good enough even at that, so for my sins I got shoved into the incarnation of a messed-up little Armenian just across the Cambridge line, across the line from all those botsy-totsy bits of ass like you. You 've been bliss, frankly. The way you talk in complete sentences, the way you bold your bead, your posture. Nice. I mean really nice. Now you begrudge me everything because of a little name-change. What's the point of living if you can V shuck skins?
No point, Art.
Come on, Kundalini. What's your old name? I've forgotten.
Sarah.
Come on, Sarah, put away that long face. Stop trying to lay a guilt trip on me with those big dark eyes. Guilt trips went out with the rest of the garbage.
Tell me. What is not garbage to you?
Purusba is not garbage. The eternal present is not garbage.
Don't touch my breasts. I mean it.
What's this protecting your tits again suddenly? We've been friendly—didn V you like it? Multiple o V, every time.
They were lovely but, as you said, partook of flux. Flux and duhkha.
Fuck flux anddubkba. Listen. I need a vacation. Everyman needs a vacation. For a man, a woman is a vacation. I need you to love me the way only you can.
I do love the way you used to say "love."
My luff for you wears a million guises. You are Sbakti, I am Shiva. I am Krishna and you are Radba, shlippery with your own sweat and rajas, your hair all in sbnakes and your clothes torn in delirious disbarray.
No, really—hands off, Arthur. Arthur Steinmetz.
My father used to say Steinmetz was a genius, my mother would say be was a dwarf. The brains behind Edison. The feeling of your ass in my bands, one cheek in each.
Darling, I'm not kidding. We've had it.
Why? Because of names? What does it matter, what name I have? Or you have? A little flick of karma, and I'm a centipede, and you 're a chestnut tree in blossom.
I can't exactly say why. For a woman to give herself—and it's utterly lovely, to
give yourself—there has to be an illusion, or it's no good. Maybe "illusion" isn't the word, since everything is 'illusion. There has to be an appearance—a possibility—of progress. There has to be rectitude.
We'll make progress. We'll have rectitude. The garbage's gone, all that drugs and paranoia. Melissa's coming with her moola. Stay here and we 'II build it up again, along more classic lines. Hinayana this time instead of Aiabayana. Less group stuff, more one-on-one. Cut out all 'the commercial crap, keep off TV. Just the bow-to-live books and the less far-out tapes, and go for a more modest operation that won V make waves in the courts. Keep peace with the local squares. This is a great spot, if we don't abuse the water situation.
Why do you want me? In your philosophy, one woman is as good TLS another. We're all lotus to your linga. With this particular lotus, I fear the bloom is off. Though of course I do adore you. More this moment than ever; there're all these new layers of you to get to know.
But no rectitude. Who'd you ever know who bad rectitude? Your husband—what was his name? Charles. Charles the Worthy. Whenever you mention him you get prim and cute and arch your back. What's going on between you two? I get the feeling be and I exist in some sort of symbiosis. It 's making me jealous as bell.
Don't be ridiculous. I can't stand him.
You ask me why I want you. One, you 're a knockout, with these super knockers and a two-bandsful ass.
Keep your hands to yourself. Don't be so adolescent. I'm almost forty-three.
Ripe. That's nice. Two, you 're every inch a lady, and I seem to be a sucker for that. My own social insecurity, no doubt. Everything goes back to having a lousy childhood.
