Aftermath of Dreaming (37 page)

Our phone calls have been platonic
since Andrew gave me the money a couple of weeks ago, so I can talk to him without worry that it's hurting anyone, we're friends, there's nothing wrong with that.

But tonight, before I leave for the retreat tomorrow, our conversation got…sexual. Which is hard. For it to and for it not to. Hard and easy and soft and dreamy and like we were made for it to. And I didn't resist even though I should have, but it was like easing into a pool where the current is rushing all over me in different ways all at once, and it was so easy to say yes to seeing him when I get back from the retreat, as easy as taking a breath before going under water.

 

The scream is coming out of me as if the image I am seeing is connected to it. The man is in front of me, black clothes, large body, hands reaching for me, coming closer to the couch, bigger and nearer, I can smell
his breath, and no one is coming to save me and he is about to grab, and I look at his face and see it finally. And the scream lets out one last burst, like a death rattle, and he disappears into the night, and I sit here holding myself, shaking quietly.

I can't believe what I saw. Then I wonder why I didn't remember it all this time. I feel pinned to the couch by the memory of the dream that has begun playing in my head. The dream that I had three years in a row when I was a child, always a spring night, and I knew each time that I was going to have it before I went to bed.

The first time, I wanted to leave the hall light on outside my bedroom, which annoyed Suzanne because it shone into her room, too, so she tried to convince my five-year-old self that I wasn't going to have a nightmare that night, it didn't work like that, as if she were so wise at nine that she could explain the mysteries of the dream realm to me, but I knew she was wrong, and once she was asleep, I slid out of bed and turned the light on.

And the nightmare did come, as I had known it would—I just didn't know what it would be about until I had it. I was in the house with Momma, Daddy, and Suzanne. It was a regular spring night, like the real one, and the Wolfman was going to come. He lived in the neighborhood a few blocks away, had a wife and kids, and his job—like my daddy had a job that I also never understood—was to scare the people in Pass Christian. One family one night per year. And it was our turn. It wasn't clear why the Wolfman was only starting to scare us now, but he was coming and no one seemed to care. Momma and Daddy weren't around and Suzanne wasn't fazed by it—the Wolfman, big deal. I was the only one who was scared, waiting for what would happen.

Finally he came. Up our front steps, across the porch and to our front door. His large dark form, black hairy hands and arms, cold mean eyes, all of him scratching at the front door, tearing at it, breaking the wood. I screamed and screamed as he tried to get inside.

I woke myself up screaming, then listened in the semidarkness. He wasn't in my room, and Suzanne seemed to be sleeping peacefully across the hall; at least, I didn't hear any screams from there. My parents
were in their room with their door shut at the end of a really dark hall. I was too afraid to go there, so I lay back down and had my first night of insomnia. Held on to Teddy, his small body wedged into my side, and prayed Hail Marys as I stared at the ceiling. I didn't trust that if I went back to sleep the Wolfman wouldn't return, so I waited until sunup before I dozed off.

The next day I told Suzanne, but she brushed it off—a Wolfman, please. I never even thought to tell Momma and Daddy.

The next spring, on the night that I knew the Wolfman was going to come, I again waited until Suzanne was asleep, then turned the hall light on. I got into bed with dread. I didn't know which was worse: the previous year when I knew a nightmare was coming but didn't know what it was about, or knowing the Wolfman would visit again. I considered trying to stay awake, maybe that would keep him away, but I knew it was inevitable—we had to have our turn like every other family in town. Trying to prevent it would only make it worse. I held on tight to Teddy. I said Hail Marys over and over. With her around, I was supposed to have nothing to fear, but it wasn't working. Maybe her power didn't extend to Wolfmen. Then sleep came.

I was in Daddy's work shed looking at a violin and Suzanne was on the swings where I was supposed to be playing when suddenly I heard her yell my name. I ran out and found her outside the shed's door. The Wolfman was walking with determination into our yard. He had a sick grin on his face, like he knew he could get us easily and wasn't going to waste his strength, but Suzanne and I broke into a run and he came after us. We ran around the house, him close on our heels, past the kitchen porch steps, past the den's back door, past the dining room's French doors, past the front porch, and round and round and round again, his breath on our backs, us barely ahead and only because we were familiar with the path, screaming for our parents, hoping they'd appear, until suddenly I woke up and I was in my bed, the sheets turned this way and that, and the house quiet and dark. I stayed up for the rest of the night, holding Teddy in my arms, knowing it was a dream, but also knowing it was somehow real.

The last time the Wolfman came, I asked Suzanne if I could sleep with her that night. I knew she'd say no, but it was a worth a shot. After she refused, I dragged myself into bed. The waiting was excruciating. I held on to Teddy and said lots of prayers, then next thing I knew, I was in the den and Daddy was in his big leather chair, the one from his study, which for some reason was downstairs, and he was listening to his jazz records, his eyes closed and head resting back. I was in my nightgown, the pale pink one with the short sleeves that had its own matching robe that made me feel so grown-up, but I had gotten too tall for it in the past year and Momma had thrown it away. I was at the back door, which was open, and the Wolfman had grabbed hold of my robe and was pulling with all his might, making the fabric taut against the back of my legs, pulling me harder and harder toward him. I screamed for Daddy's help as I pressed my body back so I wouldn't go tumbling out. My screams were louder than the jazz, so I knew he could hear me, but his eyes stayed closed, his head so relaxed, while I screamed and screamed and screamed, then suddenly Daddy disappeared as if he had never been there. The chair was empty, and my father was completely absent. The Wolfman let out a large howling laugh, and with one great tug, started to pull me out, but in a moment of inspiration I took off my robe, and with a startled look on his face, the Wolfman fell back, and I slammed the door shut, locked it tight, then woke up.

The sheet and blanket are wrapped around me as I sit on my couch looking outside at the thwarted yet growing tree and finally I understand that my father was never completely there even when he lived with us. I must have always known that, at least part of me, when I was a child to have had a dream where I had to save myself. Like I've been needing to save myself from the scream dream. And from other things I can't stop seeing. Like my grandfather's secretary, Miss Plauché, constantly walking backward to look at her past that she needed so badly to see and consequently missing her entire future.

I suddenly remember a day the summer I was ten when Suzanne and I went to our grandfather's office to have lunch with him at the top of the big bank building in the private dining room where the maître d'
always brought a perfect red rose to Suzanne and me and the bartender would send Shirley Temples to our table as if we ate there regularly. Suzanne and I were waiting in our grandfather's office while he was in the outer room, speaking to Miss Plauché.

“She lost her fiancé and two brothers in World War Two,” Suzanne said in a hushed tone, nodding with her head toward the outer room. “Then both her parents died a few years later, and she's walked backward ever since.”

My sister spoke with all the romantic drama that only a fourteen-year-old girl can, infusing love and death—almost a longing for a similar fate. As if Miss Plauché's love were more pure because she refused to let it go and move on. Which I guess is what I've been doing with Daddy and Andrew.

I go into the kitchen to fix some tea—I want warmth inside me. As I wait for the water to boil, an image of my father comes to me of him in his leather chair listening to jazz. His eyes are closed, fingers tapping, and he is alone in his study, off in his world. Then I walk in and immediately he makes room for me. I sit on his lap, close my eyes, and join him where he goes in the notes and harmonies and melodious discord and he is there with me as much as he could be. And maybe that was enough really. Or can be. Maybe that was what En Chuan was trying to tell me—that awakening to an entirely different reality is the ability to see my past differently, as a reality that was always true, but that I was asleep to.

As I pour the water into a mug, the chamomile's fragrance is released and it moves toward my face, enveloping me. My father was there as much as he could be and it didn't last as long as I needed, but he had to leave because even when he lived with us, a part of him was already gone or maybe never even moved in. And somehow I knew that and found my own way of reaching him.

I throw the tea bag away, and measure honey into the mug, stirring gold sweetness into the pale green liquid. Maybe what I had with him was enough. Okay, it wasn't what a lot of girls get, but our connection is still valid and now I have it in a way I didn't before—not obscured by
memories of need. All this time, he's been with me in my art and jewelry, as surely as I could hear him teaching me how to use his tools in his work shed. I can't not be connected to my father—he is me. Like the 10 freeway from home out here—the same spirit, just farther along in its journey.

I take my tea to the couch and sip it slowly, letting it fill me inside. The aromatic warmth holds me until I fall asleep.

The Zen Compound, in the
middle of Korea Town just west of downtown where the Zen for Christians retreat is being held, is a group of small concrete buildings with an eight-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding them—a far cry from the Asian-style house and gurgling brook that I envisioned every time I imagined my three peaceful days here. But Buddhists aren't known for being rich and the whole point of the retreat is to go within, something I definitely will want to do to get away from the aesthetics here, or lack of them.

But after registering in the main gulag-style building and walking into my dorm room, it is all I can do not to turn and run. My room turns out to be a room that I will share with the other five female retreatants. The furnishings are minimal to say the least. Six thin futon pads lie directly on the scarred hardwood floor with a sad pile of sheets, one thin blanket, and a lump that I guess was a pillow in a previous life at the foot of each. There is no other furniture or decoration, as if reminders of
our Western life would erase the meditation's effect. A row of hooks runs along one of the chipped green walls, to hang oneself from, I think, but I know it is for our clothing, the few tunics and comfortable pants we were instructed to bring. Who has ever owned a tunic, I thought when I read the confirmation letter's instructions, other than Halston or a monk?

Oh, good God, what have I gotten myself into? Did Steve know it was going to be like this? I fight the urge to run to find him and ask if he has gone completely nuts. I mean, this is clearly going to be very formal Zen and I did learn a lot of this stuff from En Chuan, but that was years ago, and this is looking very intense.

Okay, calm down, I tell myself as I unpack my bag, which means hanging my garments—I can't even think of them as clothes in this forsake-all-worldly-concerns environment—from the hook nearest my futon and putting my toiletries under the blanket. Not out of fear of thievery, I have a feeling any transgression here would cost the perpetrator twice the karmic years, but because the case they are in—the one I got for free when I bought Chanel No. 5 cologne—looks way too materialistic with its white camellias and black ribbons on gold fabric.

I walk downstairs in the late-afternoon November light and locate the building for the meditation sessions. As I enter the anteroom, I can see that the meditation hall it opens into is already filled with the other retreatants. I slip off my shoes and select a plump black zafu cushion from the shelves. At least they spent money on these, considering how much we'll be sitting on them. Carrying it in front of me, I join the group in the hall. Plain wooden platforms slightly raised off the dark hardwood floor line three sides, and on these, the retreatants are sitting deep in meditation. Steve's eyes are shut and he is in full lotus, so I settle into an empty spot a couple of retreatants away from him.

After a thirty-minute meditation that feels like three hours, a short, impossible-to-tell-her-age Japanese monk wearing a deep red robe enters and gives a dharma talk that is mildly challenging and inspiring when I am able to concentrate on it, which isn't much. I figure she is a
warm-up act for the Zen Master Jesuit priest, so I let myself wonder why it is that nuns and female monks look so ageless. Is it sex that makes us old? Like that D. H. Lawrence short story—maybe he was right after all. Which makes me think of Andrew; he looks a lot younger than his years and God knows he's fucked a helluva lot. Okay, these are not thoughts to have at a retreat, focus on what she is saying, but the monk suddenly stops. I have an odd feeling that she ended right in the middle of a sentence though I can't be sure since I wasn't paying attention, but with Zen it could have been some odd koan-style kind of lecture. She stands up, bows once, and walks out of the room, then we all get up and silently file out, stopping in the anteroom to recover our shoes, then head across the concrete courtyard to the main building.

The evening meal is exhilarating in its meagerness. The fourteen other retreatants and I are wordless and the reality of how dreadful this could be is hitting me, especially since a few of them are chewing not so silently. I have an improved appreciation for conversation at meals. I imagine a test the Zen Compound could have given—people only able to eat their meals without gestating sounds allowed in. Maybe I'll suggest it. But it would probably be looked down upon as not letting go of worldly concerns like table manners. Though why can't those be enforced? Okay, these also are probably not the kind of thoughts I'm supposed to be having, but keeping myself from pantomiming to Steve, who is down the table from me, my intolerance of the others' eating is taking all of my energy.

At the end of the noisy meal, we proceed noiselessly back to the meditation hall for the day's final za-zen and settle down on our cushions. Steve still has not acknowledged me, and that is just as well since I have a feeling that if he did, words would start flying out of me, so unused am I to this silence emitting from me, this inability to communicate with others, only with myself. No one told me that that was going to be part of this. I mean, I knew about the silence; I just didn't realize that it meant I would only be dealing with myself. That concept is terrifying, frankly. The Zen Master Jesuit priest enters the hall and slowly walks to
a special gold zafu that was placed there for him while we were gone. He settles into an intimidating lotus, especially considering that he looks like one of those red-nosed Irish priests I grew up hearing mass from, and agility of body was not a trait I associated with them. Agility with a bottle maybe, but…Anyway. Come on, get back to my meditating. I reposition myself on my cushion, pretending that this will help. As I try to feel as comfortable as the rest of the silent sentient beings appear, I think maybe this retreat won't be so bad. The Jesuit priest Zen Master is here. He'll show how Catholicism and Buddhism can cohabit. This is exactly what I need.

The first thirty minutes of meditating only feels like a hundred, and that's an improvement from this afternoon, so I'm doing fine. Okay, my head is going nonstop, but I'm fine. Other than the fact that I keep thinking about…And see, just thinking at all is a problem. Of course, I'm not supposed to attach judgment to anything, like labeling something a problem, but if anything is a problem when meditating, then thinking would be it. So I try to bring my mind back to my breathing, but all I keep thinking about is Andrew and…Adultery. And I suppose I could have left the Ten Commandments at the Zen Compound's door, but how can I forget them?

So I am in a quandary. And the Catholic guilt suddenly kicks in in preparation for my upcoming mortal sin and the Buddhist loving-kindness for myself and all sentient beings is not working and I am looking at three silent days of thinking about this because I can't speak except within the ceremonies, which so far aren't even Christian, much less Catholic, I mean, a Hail Mary out loud with everyone would really help, but the ceremonies are all very Zen. Then suddenly a little bell sounds—it doesn't ring, it sounds—and everyone gets up, so I get up, and they start walking, but a very specific kind of walking, kind of halfway between sleepwalking and being a bridesmaid, and I've done both, but I'm having a very hard time finding the balance between the two, so my rhythm is totally off, and a line has formed and people are following me, but I start going the wrong way because I can't figure out the damn
route, then suddenly the little bell sounds again and somehow everyone has ended up in front of their cushions except for me, like some horrible Zen version of musical chairs, so I rush over to mine, probably causing them to have to bring their minds back to their breathing from being annoyed at me, and we meditate some more, but all I am doing is thinking that Andrew and I had sex before he and his wife even met, so that gives me squatter's rights, and even if it doesn't, I've already committed the red-letter sin with him twice, so surely one more time isn't going to hurt, because my soul's probably already condemned, though it's karma I should be worried about, then that damn little bell sounds again, and we all get up for more weird walking, and I'm a tiny bit better this time, thank God, because it is starting to distract me from the need I am suddenly feeling to confess to everyone, but particularly the Jesuit priest if he would just act like one, then my mind starts very loudly thinking,
Can't we get to the Catholic part? I know how to do those ceremonies. I'm really very good at them, I even remember all the responses. I thought this was supposed to be a combination. Isn't this guy a Jesuit priest?

Then suddenly Steve, who has been in line behind me, steps forward next to me and, I'm sure with loving-kindness, corrects my hands. It seems I was holding them in prayer, as if I were in line for communion where the priest can see all the way down to my heart, which is becoming a deeper and darker shade of gray with the onslaught of my sin on Monday, and suddenly I lose it. A sound is coming from me that I have never heard before and I am on the floor sobbing while fourteen Christian Buddhists and a Zen Master Jesuit priest all stare at me while standing silently still.

Somehow I manage to stumble mindfully out of the hall, grab my shoes, and get outside where I stand in the concrete courtyard thinking repeatedly, like a mantra with my tears,
How in God's name am I going to be able to do this?

And then suddenly I know that I can't. I can't stay at the retreat and give up Mary and the way I grew up. And I can't see Andrew or be in touch with him ever again.

I walk silently to the dorm, get my stuff, and leave. My truck has never been such a refuge. I know the sound of the engine starting up is interrupting the retreatants' meditation, but I have to leave in a way that I've never needed to do anything. As I drive out of the compound, I dial Andrew's cell phone.

“Hi.”

“It's me.”

“Are you okay?” Andrew's voice in my ear gives my pulse a velocity I can't slow down, then I wonder if it is a rush for this to be done, but to always remain in me.

“Yeah, I left the retreat, but I'm fine, I…Can I see you, like, immediately?”

 

I kill an hour at the counter of Jan's Coffee Shop on Beverly. The bright fluorescent lights and garish noise are a relief from the semilit silence of the retreat. An unshaven man in the seat next to me is reading a worn copy of today's paper—it looks as disconnected from the world as he is. I sit still and silent on the stool, a cup of coffee before me, but inside myself, I pace. Counting the minutes, counting my breath. A little bell sounds and I almost jump up, but it is signaling that an order is ready and a wide-hipped waitress goes to fetch it, walking a well-worn route.

I drive around the emptying and indifferent L.A. streets waiting for Andrew to call me. I could only nurse a cup of coffee for so long and I want to be close to his office when he calls.

As I turn onto the street that Andrew's office is on, my cell phone rings and I tell him I'll be right there. He is standing in the open door of the building when I pull into the parking lot, looking godlike in just a T-shirt and jeans. I want to hold this image of him in the palm of my hand, hold it and kiss it and all that has been.

“Hi,” Andrew says as I get out of my truck. His chest is large, his shoulders are back, and his height carries his body down to where I
start. We don't kiss because even though it's the dark of night and no one is around, we are in public and that is never forgotten with him.

As I follow him into his office, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The lights are on so low that the walls, carpet, and furniture all look the same dusty gray. I wonder if they are like that for atmosphere or as an inventive way to camouflage private papers on his desk. When I get my bearings, I sit down on a low, deep couch; Andrew is standing on the other side of the coffee table, looking ready to pace.

“I need to tell you goodbye, Andrew.”

He looks charmingly confused, then he smiles as he comes to sit next to me, and ruffles my hair. It is all I can do to not let my head meld with his hand, fall to his lap, and do what is so natural for us.

“You've been really wonderful to me. You've always been there for me and…” And as I say the words, they are true. That terrible time in New York after my art crash, our breakup out here, him acquiring a wife and two children; all of it falls to the ground like pieces in a sculpture that never belonged. Andrew was just being Andrew. “No matter what was happening, underneath it all, I always felt kindly toward you, but I need to tell you goodbye.”

Andrew is silent, looking at me. I feel like I am being wrenched up out of too-small skin and my breath has to move past the old barrier to get into this new body where there is more room.

“Don't you think I understand what's happening here?”

I look at him sitting next to me, but bathed in his own light from a spot recessed in the ceiling. A larger but lower sphere of light surrounds us, while the rest of the room recedes into darkness.

“You're saying goodbye to your father figures, growing up. I bet you're about to meet the man you're going to marry, if you haven't already.” His calm gaze appraises my face as if he can see a mark that will tell him if that has happened.

“I look at you and I think, I've known her for twelve years. I've loved her all that time; I love her now, and I start feeling romantic toward you and that's not good. For either of us. This has been coming for a while.”

I have to fight an impulse to collapse on his chest to delay what he is confirming.

“I think back sometimes on a few of the women who were in my life before, the ones my mind naturally wanders to, the heavyweights, like you.” Andrew's eyes are on mine in the way he has looked at me for so long, making sure his thoughts become my own. “I could have married any one of you and been happy. There isn't just one true love for anyone; timing is everything.”