A Short History of Richard Kline (15 page)

But the curious thing was this: the tears kept coming, and for no reason. I was weeping for no reason, no reason at all, and I kept saying this to myself, over and over, as if it were a mantra for my recovery
. For no reason … for no reason
… Finally, I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.

After a few minutes I looked at my watch and saw that I had been weeping, silently, for forty minutes. Something had cracked, something had broken; I was dripping into my shirt, I was melting into the unyielding chair.
Ah, so this was it, this was the crack-up.
Here, on a Saturday morning, on my way to the office, in the most banal place imaginable. With no fanfare, no drama, not even a blaze of temper, I had finally lost it.

The dark-skinned woman – she whose entrance had provoked my unravelling – was sitting in an armchair at the end of the hall, in front of the stage. She was indeed diminutive, barely five feet, and draped in the gentle folds of a plain white cotton sari. Her black hair was pulled back in a large bun and she wore a thick strand of wooden beads around her neck. Her skin was unusually dark and tinged with blue. There was a glow about her, and her eyes were dark pools of reflected fire. She seemed to sit within a sheath of luminosity such as I had never seen around any woman, not even at my most besotted. And yet she was, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary woman. So why was I crying? What was this wave that had swept over me when she entered the room? Nothing could have been more mundane than this suburban hall with its plastic chairs, its fluorescent light fittings, its cork notice-board and its Anzac roll-of-honour. Yet here I was, in meltdown.

Around me, blurred figures came and went while I sat anchored to my bench, waiting for self-possession to reclaim me. I've been working too hard, I told myself, I've been stressed, the chanting caught me off my guard, it'll pass. I'll just sit here for a few more minutes, and in a little while I'll be okay.

But I wasn't okay. For a time I would subside into calm and the tears would dry and I would sigh with relief, and stand up in readiness to leave, to just stroll out the door … and then the aching pressure would return and my eyes would burn and the whole watery miasma would start up again. It was as if even by attempting to get up off my bench I had inadvertently activated some hydraulic lever, some cranial water flow, and I would be back where I was, and the bench would claim me again.

After a while I looked up at the big round clock above the door. Eleven twenty
.
I had been there almost two hours.

Two hours?
It wasn't possible. The jolt of this brought me back into real time and I was able to collect myself enough to look around the room. I could see that the hall was divided into two sides, and down the centre people were queuing to meet her. But the queue moved slowly so that they sat on the floor cross-legged, or cupped their arms around their knees and whispered to one another. Some sat with their eyes closed, as if meditating. As each supplicant reached her seated form, he or she rose up on their knees and she pressed her forehead to theirs and held it there for several seconds, then held them back from her, gazed into their eyes and flashed them a smile of tender recognition. I saw then that her body shone with a dark-skinned radiance and her composure was unfaltering. Sometimes she would laugh, as if all this – the hall, everyone there – was a tremendous joke.

Mark.
He must be here
, I thought, and once again I looked for him, this time through inflamed and bleary eyes. But he wasn't there, although, of course, he might well have come and gone while I, hapless at the side of the hall, was trying to pull myself together. But I was okay now, I was bled out, and it was definitely time to go. In my socks I began to walk towards the main doors, and was almost there when I turned to look back at her one last time, to reassure myself that this dizzying experience was real. At that moment she looked up, looked right at me, and gave an amused shrug that said, ‘What? Leaving?' And there I was, in tears again, standing stock-still and bereft at the door, all six foot one and a half inches of me, tears coursing down my already soggy cheeks. In acute shame – or was it surrender? – I wandered across to the end of the queue, dropped to my knees and sat, cross-legged, in a daze.

By the time I had moved to within a few metres of her I was calm; I had given up all resistance. I no longer cared about the indignity of it. I would go through with this strange ritual, and then it would be at an end. I would get up, walk out the door, drive home and it would be over. No-one would know it had happened.

When I was within a short radius of her I began to feel a subtle vibration in my body. I looked down at my hands and saw that I was trembling, though only slightly, perhaps not even perceptibly, and anyway I was beyond caring. Someone behind pushed me forward and she raised her hands and held my head, and her palms were cool. She drew my brow to hers, forehead to forehead, and I caught a glimpse of her small brown feet, and then I was in a white haze, fighting back the urge to break into racking sobs. When at last I stumbled to my feet I tripped and almost fell. One of her attendants handed me a clutch of tissues and I wiped my eyes.

Outside, it was hot. The light was piercing. Somehow I made my way across the grass and back to the car. It was futile even to consider working in this state and I decided to go home, but for a long time I was in a trance, driving on automatic pilot. I was halfway across the bridge before I looked down at my feet and realised that I was wearing someone else's shoes.

I decided to tell Zoe about my experience – I could not disguise the state I was in – but when I arrived home Zoe was asleep.

She slept for a long time. It was unlike her but I thought of it as a blessing. It gave me the hours to compose myself.

In the days immediately following, I could never find the right moment to get the words out. ‘Guess what? On Saturday I had this strange experience. I saw this Indian woman and I cried like a baby. What do you make of that?' Then I decided it was an aberration, a random event of no consequence, and Zoe would only be disturbed by my account of it, possibly even panic-stricken; better that she didn't know.

Soon I began to think of the experience as unexceptional, and by the end of the week a confession had become unnecessary because I had found within myself the reason for this strange behaviour. Stress. I was overwrought. Working too late, sleeping too little. And the woman had been so compassionate, so beautiful in her ways that she had moved me at my most vulnerable. And if for the first time in my memory of myself I had wept, then no doubt it was because I had felt safe: among strangers. It was like the story of the two men on the train who tell each other their most intimate secrets, safe in the knowledge they will never meet again, will never have to endure a relationship burdened by their defenceless intimacy.

On the Monday I was on my mettle, waiting for Mark to sidle up and say something, but that morning he phoned in sick with what subsequently proved to be a severe bout of hepatitis. His convalescence was prolonged, and carried out at his parents' home on the south coast, by which time he had been head-hunted for a job in Hong Kong. On the day that Mark eventually came in to farewell his colleagues I was at a conference in Melbourne. And thus it was that I never saw Mark again. I sent him a note at his new workplace to congratulate him and wish him well, but did not think to ask if he had in fact been at the Chatswood Community Centre on that Saturday morning. Mark sent me a jokey pornographic postcard from Hong Kong, and that was the last contact we had.

And so I forgot about her. It was just one of those turns, one of those blips on the radar screen when an asteroid careers through the heavens. Until a strange thing happened: at the point at which I had almost forgotten the experience, she began to appear in my meditation.

One torpid morning, when my daily ritual seemed stale, when it seemed to be getting me nowhere, I thought for the first time that I might abandon the practice. At that moment her face floated into my inner vision. It was nothing dramatic: no flash of light, no heart-jolting frisson. Just her dark-skinned face, hovering in my mind's eye with luminous clarity. And a few days later it happened again. But I thought nothing of this. Many images came and went in the distracting mangle of thoughts that passed in my case for contemplation. Did I believe in the process? Perhaps I never had believed in it, but I clung to it like a capsized fisherman might cling to a piece of the wreckage from his drowned boat.

As time went on, that dark, luminous face began to arise in my meditation more often, sometimes as soon as I sat down and closed my eyes. Before long she was there with me almost every day, though only for a matter of seconds. And what I felt with each visitation was entirely neutral. No tears. Nothing. And who was she? I had no idea.

A year passed.

One morning I saw her face on a poster in the window of a New Age bookshop in the Chatswood mall. According to the poster, she was a Hindu saint from a village in Tamil Nadu. It seemed that once a year she toured the cities on the eastern seaboard, bestowing her own peculiar form of blessing on her devotees, and on any members of the public who cared to come. In two weeks she would be in Sydney again: same time, same place. And what would happen, I asked myself, if I went to see her, this time deliberately, knowing what was in store?

When I returned to my office I checked the date of her visit in my diary and saw that I was booked to run a training program in Adelaide. Good. That settled that.

As it happened, the training program was postponed. But it was, nevertheless, a full weekend: a school concert of Luke's on the Friday evening, a picnic lunch on the Saturday, a dinner in the evening at the harbourside penthouse of Zoe's boss.

On the night before the picnic I thought of
her
, of how she might already be in the city, and I recalled my meltdown of a year ago and felt strangely indifferent, as if it had happened to someone else.

Lunch on Saturday was a barbecue in Centennial Park. Zoe and Luke and I arrived in good time and lugged the picnic hamper to the designated spot by the Federation dome, chosen because the children could ride their bikes and there was space for the families to have a relaxed game of baseball.

It was an overcast day, a bank of charcoal cloud hovering low in the sky. Zoe's brother Ben came with his kids, who were on their paternal access weekend, and he and I talked listlessly about politics. Was it me, I wondered, or did all conversation suddenly seem stale? Sentences snapped off in mid-air and hung dangling. Ben seemed to be saying the same things, over and over, but he was in a better mood than usual. Everyone was in a good mood except me.

When I looked at the others it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, a kind of stoned feeling where the figures in the landscape retreat from you and come increasingly to seem two-dimensional. The more stoned you become, the more the life leaches out of them. Either that or you are staring through a pane of thick glass.

After lunch I volunteered to walk the children over to the kiosk for ice-creams, and on the way I gave myself a pep talk. It didn't work. All through the day I was edgy and didn't know why. I had charred the steak, knocked over a bottle of wine so that it seeped into the bread and stained Zoe's picnic cloth, and worst of all had been impatient and distracted with Luke. Sent out to mind second base, I drifted off into some white sphere of discontent that soon had me marooned in a knot of self-reproach.

It was just after three when I looked at my watch and thought: I could just make it. I walked over to where Zoe was sitting beneath the blue-gums, as happy and relaxed as I had ever seen her. I looked down at her dark glasses and her broad straw hat and it was as if I scarcely knew her.

Bending low to her ear, I said. ‘The car keys are in my jacket. I have to go for a walk. Don't ask me any questions now. I'll be back in time to take Luke to Rachel's.'